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

Hi Dan,

let me give you a pointer to our project called loomp
(http://loomp.org). Unfortunately we are in a preliminary state right
now, but you can check out the demo to look at and feel the core ideas.

In brief: Basically, loomp addresses the issue of annotating content in
a way that limits the additional effort for the author as it extends the
common separation of content and design. Highlighting as bold, italic,
underlined, etc. is a task for the information consumer in loomp by use
of a faceted-viewing-toolbar, the author just creates contents with
additional structured metadata accessable as XHTML/RDFa or RDF. The
visualization is driven by a templating mechanism (formatting).

The vision is to release a LAMP compatible, easy to use Linked Data
authoring tool for everyone, so the ordinary Web user gets the chance to
participate in the Web of Data (publishing and consuming) without being
bound to various data silos and with the chance to spread the
information to various targets and channels.

I hope this is interesting for you and encourage everyone around to give
us feedback about our approach.

Cheers,

Markus

Dan Brickley schrieb:
> (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
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 22 May 2009 18:27:18 UTC