NISO/Internet Archive Meeting on Social Bookmarking and Annotation

Open Annotation Collaboration Overview

NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011

RobertSanderson–[email protected]@gmail.comHerbertVandeSompel–[email protected]@gmail.com

DigitalLibraryResearchandPrototypingTeamLosAlamosNaDonalLaboratory,USA

h"p://www.openannota-on.org/

ThisresearchwasfundedbytheAndrewW.MellonFoundaDon.Acknowledgements:TimCole,AnnaGerber,TomHabing,BernhardHaslhofer,JaneHunter,

RayLarson,CliffLynch,MichaelNelson,DougReside




Open Annotation Collaboration

•  Project Partners:

•  Los Alamos National Laboratory •  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign •  University of Queensland •  University of Maryland •  George Mason University

•  Funding: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

•  Discussion Group: http://groups.google.com/group/oac-discuss



Current Annotation Systems

•  Repository-centric, with local identifiers •  Need to rethink in terms of the Web and global URIs

•  Annotations stuck in silos: •  Only consumable in original client/server combination •  Can not create cross-system services to merge or enrich

•  Focus on annotation for scholarly purposes •  But desire to make the OAC framework more broadly usable •  Need tools, communities, integration of scholarly communication

with other areas of discourse



Basic Model

The basic model has three resources: •  Annotation (an RDF document) •  Body (the comment) •  Target (the resource the Body is about)



Basic Model Example



Segments of Resources

•  Most annotations are about part of a resource

•  Different segments for different media types: •  Text: paragraph, arbitrary span of words •  Image: rectangular or arbitrary shaped area •  …

•  We introduce a method of constraining resources •  Can be applied to either Body or Target resource •  Use media-specific fragment URIs •  Use W3C Media Fragments URI specification •  Introduce an approach for arbitrarily complex segments



Constraints

•  ConstrainedTarget resource identifies the segment of interest •  Normally a UUID URI that cannot be dereferenced

•  Constraint resource describes the segment of interest



Constraint Example



Sharing Annotations

•  OAC is designed for publically sharing Annotations •  No built in User/Group/Permissions system •  Can protect web resources with regular techniques •  Scholars want flexible sharing options (class, project, peers…) •  Possible marketplace for systems that filter/rank annotations

•  OAC Clients are autonomous •  Not an annotation protocol, but a data model plus a publish/

subscribe mechanism •  No reliance on a server to generate annotations

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Protocol (Annotea)

publish, subscribe, consume

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Publish/Subscribe (OAC)

publish subscribe consume

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Lessons Learnt

•  Hardest thing is to define the scope of "Annotation"!

•  Requirement for expressiveness in segmentation •  URI Fragments are insufficient •  Can't merge Identifier and Description •  Distrust of quoting passages:

enough annotations and the entire text is available •  Yet equal distrust of character offsets, as the text may change

•  Motivating public rather than private annotations is important •  Filtering un-interesting public annotations equally important!

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Advantages of OAC for eBooks

•  Already strong and growing community

•  Research and modeling has been both deep and broad •  Enables complicated scholarly use cases •  Complexity scales up from simple to promote broad adoption

•  Very interested in eBook requirements •  Crucial use case for both scholarly and general adoption •  Textual constraints not yet standardized, and very important •  Lack of network protocol important in offline eBook annotations

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http://www.openannotation.org/

NISO/Internet Archive Meeting on Social Bookmarking and Annotation

Technology

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