Re: Annotea futures? Annotation standards in 2009...

That's something I ought to look at too, Nikki.

Then there's POWDER which, unless something unexpected happens, will be 
at Proposed Rec very soon. That's all about annotating/describing groups 
of resources cf. adding annotations within specific resources but, since 
the output (once processed) is RDF, it's all interoperable.

Phil.

NJ Rogers, Learning and Research Technology wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
> You might want to look at our <http://code.google.com/p/caboto/> project 
> which was a small spin-out effort from 3 projects each with a social 
> software annotations aspect.
> 
> We looked at use cases from different contexts and but this has not 
> really been about annotating parts of a page but more about annotating 
> resources (with a dedicated 'page') such as "an event", or making a 
> time-based video annotation.
> 
> Nikki
> 
> --On 22 May 2009 16:00 +0200 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
> 
>> (I'm cc:'ing 3 lists, rather warily; if the thread gets long, please
>> consider trimming it to just use semantic-web@w3.org)
>>
>> Hi all
>>
>> I'm involved in helping advise a new not-for-profit project that is close
>> in approach to the old Annotea project, looking at annotations within
>> pieces of Web content, and their cross-linking, threading for discussion
>> etc. It's now 2009, over ten years since the original Annotea designs.
>> The Web has changed a lot since then, but the need to annotate it doesn't
>> seem to have gone away.
>>
>> See http://annotea.org/
>> http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/User/Tutorial/quicktutorial and nearby for
>> an overview of Annotea.
>>
>> Since then Web 2.0 has happened, and now many of the original themes of
>> Annotea are part of the mainstream Web developer perspective. And yet ...
>> looking at the comments to this 2007 techcrunch survey -
>> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/10/5-ways-to-mark-up-the-web/ - I see
>> project after project, startup after startup, exploring this space
>> without any great emphasis on data exchange standards. I guess many of
>> them have APIs, probably a lot of them use RSS or Atom feeds. But we
>> certainly haven't yet to the place imagined by Annotea: an annotation
>> layer for the Web that allows comments, scribbles, reviews, discussions
>> to be freely interlinked and overlaid using open standard formats and
>> protocols.
>>
>> So I'm mailing the relevant (and pretty quiet) lists but cc:'ing
>> semantic-web@w3.org too to ask where folk thing this stuff is heading.
>>
>> When is an annotation an annotation, versus a page that happens to be a
>> review, or happens to have as it's primary topic another page? For
>> annotations at the page level, it might be that mainstream RDF work
>> (linked data etc) has fulfilled some of the early promise of Annotea.
>>
>> But for the "annotating parts of a page" scenario that lies at the heart
>> of many people's notion of annotations, there doesn't seem to be much
>> happening in terms of practical and widely adopted standards. Lots of
>> startups, experiments etc but they all seem to be islands. And since
>> annotation systems are only really interesting when you have enough
>> annotations to get decent coverage, this seems a pity.
>>
>> Thoughts? Am I missing some developments? What would Annotea look like if
>> rebuilt for the Web of 2009? If it's in RDF, the query part would just
>> use SPARQL, and topic classification would be SKOS. What else? Is there
>> implementation experience from Annotea adopters and implementors gathered
>> somewhere? Is there consensus for example on the best bits of information
>> to keep if you want a robust reference to a piece of a potentially
>> evolving page? How well do modern Web design habits (CSS, Ajax etc)
>> interact with the overlay of 3rd party annotations? Is everyone using
>> Firefox addons, javascript bookmarklets and Web proxies or is there some
>> hope for a cross-browser approach on the horizon?
>>
>> thanks for any suggestions, thoughts, links etc.
>>
>> cheers,
>>
>> Dan
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------
> NJ Rogers, Technical Researcher
> (Senior Technical Developer and Coordinator of Web Futures)
> Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)
> Email:nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk
> Tel: +44(0)117 3314412 (Direct)
> Tel: +44(0)117 3314430 (Office)
> 
> 

-- 

Phil Archer
http://philarcher.org/www@20/

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Received on Friday, 22 May 2009 15:29:16 UTC