Types of annotation

My name's Phil Cross and I'm working on an EU funded project called
MedCERTAIN (www.medcertain.org). This is intended to investigate the
labelling and possible trustmarking of health related Web sites. The
Institute for Learning & Research Technology at Bristol University is
responsible for providing the system that will be used for creating
descriptive and/or evaluative metadata about such Health Sites. A lot of
the software is coming from  work on an RDF recommender system we
developed under the DESIRE project <http://www.desire.org/>.

Anyway ... my problem is this ...

With the MedCERTAIN project, we have what you might call a number of
different comment or annotation types: there is a set of metadata
provided by the health site publisher themselves (more like a catalogue
record); the latter set of metadata but now verified and with some
evaluative metadata added by a third party; and as the third stage in
the
process, additional content evaluation metadata. In addition to these,
we will have more basic comments attached to sites of the type: "I think
this site is good | bad | smelly | etc" made, potentially, by users. The
fact that the site has had a subject gateway or some other type of
directory produce a catalogue record about it might also be seen as an
annotation, which we could point to.

I feel it is necessary to somehow differentiate between these different
annotation types, so that it is easy to see what is available for a
particular site, and separate annotations by type when presenting them
to users; the question is, what is the best way of doing this?

The basic structure for the RDF triples of comments or annotations, that
we currently use, is to have an annotationID as a unique ID, which has
properties such as 'annotates' (for the URI of the Web page), DC.Title,
DC.subject, etc. I'm wondering if we should add an extra property called
annotationType, and try and define some standard values for this. Or
perhaps the 'annotates' property itself should have subclasses (e.g.
'comments' or 'evaluates', or should the annotationID be subclassed?

Apologies to those not familiar with RDF terminology, but essentially
what I needed to know is if anyone else has done work on defining some
standard set of annotation 'types'. Any thoughts appreciated.

Cheers,
Phil



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Phil Cross
Senior Technical Researcher
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol
8 - 10 Berkeley Square
Bristol, BS8 1HH

Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7113
Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112
E-mail: phil.cross@bristol.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmpac
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Received on Thursday, 12 October 2000 11:25:24 UTC