RE: Orphaned annotations

>Resource discovery of people's annotations:
1- same model as search engine (most likely you won't get ALL annotations, but you could get back
the most popular ones if the engine is Google-like)
2- if you know you work with a group, you can agree to embed your annotations in a set of web pages
that the client parses to extract the annotations

>What's the motivation for these private annotations when you can use an annotea server?
1- My question now: how can you reference your annotation stored in an annotea server? Even if you could,
how long would you be sure this URL provided to you by the server will be valid? By having stand alone
annotations encoded in hyperlinks, you only have the risk that the document you annotate changes.
2- You need an annotea server, not with embedded annotations: everyone could start authoring annotations
(as they did with web pages, which lead to VERY useful techniques to use these links - like Google)
3- Having your standalone annotations embedded in your web page is safer (you don't need
the server to tell you the anchor point and the comment
4- You can defer the publication of your annotations (as most people do when they first create personal
bookmarks and then decide they are worth sharing). This could also reduce the amount of junk annotations.

The only limitation I found of encoding the annotation in a URL is that it does not permit to store long comments.
One solution then would be to use a link within the url, as in:
http://www.cnn.com#anchor=word1+word2&text=http://www.annotea.com/text50

But maybe that's not a problem.
Annotea team: could you give us a quick number for the average length of a comment in your annotation servers?
By the way, when I tested Yawas, the most prominent use was the highlight function. I had to redesign it
so that users could quickly highlight, not having to fill in a form or even a comment.

Laurent.

Received on Thursday, 21 March 2002 02:20:50 UTC