Re: W3C Annotation Working Group?

Hi Robert,

Our group at Harvard and the Mass General Hospital has been involved in open annotation for some time and was a founding member of the Community Group. We are also W3C members, and will support formation of this WG, taking part in its activities and discussions. We believe this will be a seminal technology for the Web which deserves to be standardized and widely implemented. 

All best

Tim


Tim Clark
Assistant Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
Director of Informatics, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease
co-Director, Data and Statistics Core, Massachusetts Alzheimer Disease Research Center
65 Landsdowne St., Suite 200, Cambridge MA 02139
ph: 1-617-947-7098 fax: 617-213-5418

On Jan 8, 2014, at 2:52 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> First, we hope that you've all had a safe and happy holidays!
> 
> Just before the break, a conversation was started in the W3C about possibly using annotation as an experimental means of commenting on specifications and drafts; this conversation also drew the attention on the more general need for Web users to annotate web pages at large. This practical requirement would tie in neatly with the ongoing work in the Digital Publishing Interest Group and in the IDPF (http://idpf.org/) to flesh out the use cases and application of the Open Annotation model in that field.
> 
> In order to take our annotation work to the next level, especially in the publishing domain but across the board in terms of annotation being a critical component of the Open Web Platform including browser-facing aspects, a number of people feel that creating an Annotations Working Group (WG) is both timely and important. This group would formalize and build on the Open Annotation specification and data model, and would also explore the browser side such as robust addressability, events, JavaScript APIs, and so on; the precise details would be worked out over the next several weeks in a proposed Annotations WG charter, within W3C's Information and Knowledge (INK) domain. The result would be a one or more official technical Recommendations (e.g., http://www.w3.org/TR/OpenAnnotation/) which can only be created by a WG, not by a Community Group.
> 
> Ivan Herman and Doug Schepers would help guide the group in their capacities at W3C, Ivan on the Semantic Web, Linked Data, and Digital Publishing side, and Doug on the Web application, browser, and developer outreach side.
> 
> What does this mean for the Community Group?  Firstly, all W3C members are warmly and strongly encouraged to join the Working Group! Secondly, since the WG will continue to conduct all its technical work in public, anyone who is not affiliated with a member institution can continue to be part of the discussion on the mailing list, and those who are able to actively contribute (e.g. editing, writing tests, managing issues, or maintaining support documents like use cases and requirements or developer documentation) will be considered for Invited Expert status.
> 
> If you just want to keep track of what's going on, then there's no need to do anything different. While the specification discussions would move to the Working Group, we would keep the Open Annotation Community Group alive as a platform to solicit broader feedback to issues arising in the WG, and to provide a discussion forum for existing community members. Paolo and I will take responsibility for acting as go-betweens for the CG and WG -- your input and support throughout the process so far has been extremely valuable and greatly appreciated.  We will make sure there's clear communication and close ties with this existing community.
> 
> Please let us know your thoughts on this idea!  While we think that a formal TR will carry significantly more weight than the current community draft, especially with larger industrial potential adopters, and that a broader scope of work can strengthen the market, we want to make sure you agree that the creation of a WG is the right thing to do at this stage. Do you think this is the right step? Would you be interested in participating in this proposed WG? Please give us your comments here!
> 
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Rob and Paolo



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