Re: barriers to deployment of web annotation?

Martin Hamilton wrote:
> I hear there was this 'Mosaic' thing, once upon a time ;-)

Yes, I think it was Mosaic...

> there's a distinction to be
> drawn between private annotations (which could be implemented entirely
> within the punter's browser, for instance), and 'public' annotations

Good : and people would start using
annotations if, for instance, they
are able to send an annotated URL to
their friends by email (not the
whole document, but the URL with extra
parameters).
I'm working on such an idea for my PhD.
XML, and more specifically XML Pointer,
is a good candidate to code
annotations within the URL
(adding parameters like
#ROOT()STRING(3,"string to search",0).

The problem with existing annotation
systems (see www.crit.org) is
that they rely on a server. I think a
client-side program is better,
for privacy concerns.
Then it may be possible to share
annotations
by email and, for people who need that,
to publish them and
share them via a server (not necessary
public).

> This might even make a Yahoo/Hotbot/... type centralised
> system practical, given the widespread deployment of WWW caching by
> ISPs and end user sites.  Vendors' existing file upload code would
> probably be a good starting point for annotation uploads.  Add
> additional HTTP response headers and/or HTML HEAD tags pointing to the
> annotations' URLs, and QED ?

Yes, once personal annotations are
created, you can imagine people
would submit them to Search Engines of a
particular type (annotations).

Laurent,
PhD student, Syscom laboratory,
University of Savoie, FRANCE.
My project : "using in-line annotations
for semi-automatic generation
of Dublin Core Metadatas on Web
documents"

Received on Monday, 7 December 1998 02:54:39 UTC