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

Here's a list of annotation and note-taking tools (mainly web 2.0?) that you
could check:
http://digitalresearchtools.pbworks.com/Annotation+and+Notetaking+Tools

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:00 PM, 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
>
>
>
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