Does annotation need a huge central data base?

Misha Glouberman <misha@the-wire.com> writes:

> I suspect that I'm way less technically savvy than most people on the
> list, and am thus a little wary about arguing feasibility. I recognize
> that a central public comments database would be huge- definitely too big
> for a single publicly-minded individual or organization to maintain out of
> altruism or in the name of research. But it's not clear to me that it
> would be bigger than existing free commercial web search engines- and it
> does seem possible to operate it on a similar business model. (Assuming,
> of course, that Web search engines actually are profitable- for all I
> know, they're all still losing money...) 

An annotation system does not need a large central data base.

The main principle should be that annotations are stored close to the
server which stores the annotated message. It is possible to design
an algorithm for finding the closest annotation site as follows:

If you want to annotate a document stored at www.foo.bar.net,
then first check if www.foo.bar.net has an annotation server. If so,
store it there. If www.foo.bar.net does not have any annotation
server, check if foo.bar.net has one, and store it there. If
foo.bar.net has no annotation server, check for a server at bar.net.

In the beginning, when annotations are little used, many annotation
will end up in the central servers at "net" and "bar.net" in my
example. But as annotations get more widespread, more sites will
run their own local annotation server.

It is important to design the naming scheme for annotations, so that
an annotation originally stored at for example "net" or "bar.net"
can be moved to "foo.bar.net" when foo.bar.net gets its own
annotation server, without having to change the name of the
annotation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

Received on Friday, 9 August 1996 13:33:29 UTC