Annotation Portal

Annotea is a LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations. By annotations we mean comments, notes, explanations, or other types of external remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document without actually needing to touch the document. When the user gets the document he or she can also load the annotations attached to it from a selected annotation server or several servers and see what his peer group thinks. Annotea is open; it uses and helps to advance W3C standards when possible. For instance, we use an RDF based annotation schema for describing annotations as metadata and XPointer for locating the annotations in the annotated document. Annotea is part of the Semantic Web efforts. The annotations are stored in annotation servers as metadata and presented to the user by a client capable of understanding this metadata and capable of interacting with an annotation server with the HTTP service protocol. The first client implementation of Annotea is W3C's Amaya editor/browser. Nothing prevents other clients from implementing these capabilities too. The current Amaya user interface for annotations is presented in the Amaya documentation.

Marja-Ritta Koivunen

http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture.html#Collaboration

LEAD

marja@w3.org