Presentation of OAC to group interested in standardizing annotation and bookmarking of eBooks, including academics, publishers, start-ups and funding agencies.
NISO/Internet Archive Meeting on Social Bookmarking and Annotation
1. Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
h"p://www.openannota-on.org/
Robert Sanderson – rsanderson@lanl.gov
azaroth42@gmail.com
Herbert Van de Sompel – herbertv@lanl.gov
hvdsomp@gmail.com
Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team
Los Alamos NaDonal Laboratory, USA
This research was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon FoundaDon.
Acknowledgements: Tim Cole, Anna Gerber, Tom Habing, Bernhard Haslhofer, Jane Hunter,
Ray Larson, Cliff Lynch, Michael Nelson, Doug Reside
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
2. 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
3. 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
4. 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
5. Basic Model Example
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
6. 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
7. 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
8. Constraint Example
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
9. 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
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
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NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
10. Protocol (Annotea)
publish, subscribe, consume
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
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NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
11. Publish/Subscribe (OAC)
publish subscribe consume
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
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NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
12. 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!
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
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NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
13. 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
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
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NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011
14. http://www.openannotation.org/
Open Annotation Collaboration Overview
NISO/IA Bookmarking and Annotation Meeting, NYC, 26th May 2011