- From: Ka-Ping Yee <ping@lfw.org>
- Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 06:59:58 -0600 (CST)
- To: David M Bargeron <davemb@microsoft.com>
- cc: Jim Ley <jim@jibbering.com>, <www-annotation@w3.org>
On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, David M Bargeron wrote:
> We have done some work in the area of robust anchoring for annotations
> on web pages. We found that using "human-level" page content as the
> basis for anchoring was more effective than using the internal structure
> of the page.
Bravo. The truth of this last statement should be obvious to everyone.
Of course it has to be human-level content; it is humans that these
systems are supposed to serve, after all -- or have we forgotten that?
I saw your presentation at CHI 2001, and thought you guys did some
pretty cool work with your anchoring algorithm. I was sad that
you didn't cite Crit in your paper, but I now see that at least
you mentioned it in your tech report.
I was impressed by the clever results you got by keeping track of
keywords and context, as you do. But i have to say i'm not certain
that's necessarily a win. With an algorithm like that, there are
a few issues:
1. For deployment as an interoperable standard, you have to
specify the algorithm and any data it relies on so that
all implementations produce exactly the same result.
So you would need to standardize all your tuning parameters,
scoring weights, thresholds and so on.
2. It is unreasonable to expect that a user could duplicate all
of the steps in your algorithm to predict the outcome.
This makes it possible to have failures that no user could
prepare for or defend against.
There's still potential for fuzzy matching algorithms as a way of
suggesting possible relevant areas of the target document after an
annotation has been orphaned. It would be worth comparing the
utility of this to the utility of simply displaying the original
anchor with some context.
-- ?!ng
Received on Tuesday, 19 March 2002 08:00:03 UTC