Re: Work in Progress on a new Annotation Working Group Charter (Advance Notice)

After attending and presenting at the W3C Annotation Workshop and iAnnotate conference in San Francisco, we are very supportive of creating this new Annotations Working Group.  We believe that implementation gaps in Web accessibility can be addressed by enabling the crowdsourcing of descriptions of visual content, such as images, diagrams and video.  Annotation could also aid in the transcription of mathematical expressions embedded in images into MathML.

Our presentation from the workshop can be found at:
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/gcapiel/i-annotate-prez-2014
Powerpoint: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39156804/iAnnotate%20Prez%202014.ppt

Sincerely,

Gerardo

Gerardo Capiel
VP of Engineering
benetech

650-644-3405 - Twitter: @gcapiel<http://twitter.com/gcapiel> - GPG: 0x859F11C4
Fork, Code, Do Social Good: http://benetech.github.com/

On Feb 4, 2014, at 3:03 AM, Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org<mailto:coralie@w3.org>> wrote:

Dear Advisory Committee Representative,

This is an advance notice that the Team has started work on a charter for a Working Group supporting annotations in Web pages, in digital books and magazines, and other types of media on the Web.

Annotating, i.e., the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information, is a widespread activity online in many guises but currently lacks a structured approach. Web citizens make comments about online resources using either tools built into the hosting web site, external web services, or the functionality of an annotation client. Readers of ebooks use the tools provided by reading systems to add and share their thoughts or highlight portions of texts. Comments about photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, audio tracks on SoundCloud, people's posts on Facebook, or mentions of resources on Twitter could all be considered to be annotations associated with the resource being discussed.

The possibility of annotation is essential for many application areas. For example, it is standard practice for students to mark up their printed textbooks when familiarizing themselves with new materials; the ability to do the same with electronic materials (e.g., books, journal articles, or infographics) is crucial for the advancement of e-learning. Submissions of manuscripts for publication by trade publishers or scientific journals undergo review cycles involving authors and editors or peer reviewers; although the end result of this publishing process usually involves Web formats (HTML, XML, etc.), the lack of proper annotation facilities for the Web platform makes this process unnecessarily complex and time consuming. Communities developing specifications jointly, and published, eventually, on the Web, need to annotate the documents they produce to improve the efficiency of their communication.

There is a large number of closed and proprietary web-based “sticky note” and annotation systems offering annotation facilities on the Web or as part of ebook reading systems. The primary complaint about these is that the user-created annotations cannot be shared, reused in another environment, archived, and so on, due to a proprietary nature of the environments where they were created. The goal of this Working Group is to provide an open approach for annotation, making it possible for browsers, reading systems, JavaScript libraries, and other tools, to develop an annotation ecosystem where users have access to their annotations from various environments, can share those annotations, can archive them, and use them how they wish.

The mission of the Annotation Working Group, which we may propose to add to the Digital Publishing Activity, is to define a generic data model for annotations, and define the basic infrastructural elements to make it deployable in browsers and reading systems.

A draft charter is available (this is not a formal review, just an  early draft):
  https://www.w3.org/2014/01/Ann-charter.html

The goal of this draft is to provide a framework for a public discussion on the creation of an annotation working group at w3c. We also anticipate getting community perspectives on the scope of this proposed charter at a Workshop on Annotation that W3C plans to organize in April, co-located with the I Annotate conference in San Francisco. The current plan is to finalize the charter soon after that event. Once the charter is finalized, it will be reviewed by the director and W3M and then sent to you for formal approval.

We welcome your comments and questions as well as general expressions of interest and support on <w3c-ac-forum@w3.org<mailto:w3c-ac-forum@w3.org>>, copied to <public-annotation@w3.org<mailto:public-annotation@w3.org>> (this is a public mailing list). You may also send comments directly to Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org<mailto:ivan@w3.org>> or Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org<mailto:schepers@w3.org>>.

This announcement follows section 6.2.2 of the Process Document:
  http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/groups#WGCharterDevelopment

For Tim Berners-Lee, Director,
Ralph Swick, Information and Knowledge Domain Lead,
Ivan Herman, Digital Publishing Activity Lead;
Coralie Mercier, W3C Communications

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Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Communications Team  -  http://www.w3.org
mailto:coralie@w3.org +336 4322 0001 http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/