The IMesh Toolkit

[ Work In Hand > Components> Annotation ]

Annotation

Introduction

Annotation enables users of subject gateways to make and read digital comments and guidance in connection with a gateway's original resources, or at one remove, the gateway's descriptions of those resources. By their nature, annotations do not have to be embedded alongside or stored with the base documents, a considerable advantage over their non-digital counterparts. Initial work concentrated on considering functionality in annotation applications across a variety of contexts including Virtual Learning Environments where a multiplicity of users in VLE's would have different uses and expectations of an annotation system. In response to a move towards co-operation with the RDN, work moved to considering how an annotation system might work in conjunction with an existing resource discovery service without requiring the latter to make any major changes in its operation in order to provide a Web-based annotation capability.

As a means to providing a design which might readily be accessed by developers working in a variety of programming languages, the UML (Unified Modelling Language) design approach was adopted and a set of use cases pertaining to a straight-forward set of functionality was produced. These cases were validated using a further UML method and subsequently developed into data which could be used by developers. These initial use cases provided the basis upon which work could be carried forward on considering the viability of an extension to functionality which could prove useful to gateway developers, namely automated annotation moderation.

Annotation Design

The design of a basic annotation system is described in user view terms and in a detailed design. There is also an extension to the basic design.

The approach to the design is discussed.

The documents containing the UML use case and sequence diagrams and screen prototyping are also available.

Annotation Software

The annotation design was followed by an implementation phase The software developed in this phase is available for download.

Annotation Article in Ariadne

Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and supporting real-world annotation looks at both pre-digital and digital concepts of annotation, with a view to how annotation tools might be used in the subject-gateway environment.
Waller, Richard. "Functionality in Digital Annotation: Imitating and supporting real-world annotation" Ariadne, Issue 35, 30 April 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/waller/

Some Annotation Links

These pages were maintained by Monica Duke and Richard Waller of UKOLN, University of Bath.

This page was last updated on March 14th 2007.

The IMesh Toolkit project was funded under the NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative from September 1999 to July 2003.