Re: help me to tell annotea..

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Michele Costantini wrote:

Hi

I can't answer all your questions about Annotea, but just wanted to note...

> 	4. when you think that the commercial browser adopt the standard and
> add the annotation-features?

...that basic "3rd party annotation" facilities are already deployed in
commercial browsers. Netscape launched their "What's Related" service (an
early RDF application) a couple of years ago. It requests very simple
annotations from their server; the annotation format basically just says
"here are some pages that may be on a related topic". I believe they use
the Alexa database (http://www.alexa.com/) and that Internet Explorer has
a similar facility.

Netscape have some pages up about their "What's Related" or "Smart
Browsing" service, see:

	http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/
	http://home.netscape.com/escapes/smart_browsing/index.html
	http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/faq.html

The interesting thing with developments like Annotea is that by proposing
a common cross-browser vocabulary to support annotation services, we see the
prospect of a marketplace for third-party annotations. The Netscape page
hints at this, showing someone looking at the Ford car site, and then
navigating to 3rd-party reviews of a car, other places to buy that model
etc.

Dan