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 Overview
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Basic Model
The basic model has three resources: • Annotation (an RDF document) • Body (the comment) • Target (the resource the Body is about)
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Basic Model Example
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Constraints
• ConstrainedTarget resource identifies the segment of interest • Normally a UUID URI that cannot be dereferenced
• Constraint resource describes the segment of interest
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Constraint Example
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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
9
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Protocol (Annotea)
publish, subscribe, consume
1
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
Publish/Subscribe (OAC)
publish subscribe consume
1
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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!
1
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
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
1
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
http://www.openannotation.org/