1. Integrating Annotator
with H20
Steph Skardal
steph@endpoint.com
i don’t tweet.
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com
@endpoint

2. Overall Concept
● What is H2O?
○ The Berkman Center (Harvard Law)
○ Annotated digital legal casebook content
○ Aggregate content to create syllabus (playlists)
for course material. Extension of LMS.
○ H2O is “old”, by web standards
○ open source, Ruby on Rails, jQuery
○ http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/

3. Why am I here?
● How is End Point involved?
○ End Point is a dev shop that has been working
with The Berkman Center for several years, on
various projects.

5. Current Project Status

6. ● H2O offers home-grown annotation
functionality.
○ Performance is terrible
○ Versioning is not fun
○ Usability is not intuitive
● But it works(ish)!

7. Importance of Annotator
● Do we need the ability to annotate content?
○ Yes!
● Do we need Annotator?
○ Performance, usability is a current issue.
Non-normalized use.
○ Also… we’d like a better solution to more
easily handle versioned content.
○ And… we want to eventually add support
for multi-media annotations.

8. Screenshot: Syllabus

9. Example Screenshots

10. Screenshot: Actions

11. Screenshot: Color Coded Tagging

12. Screenshot: Colored Highlights

13. Screenshot: Heatmap

14. Demo: Links to Other Assets

15. Project Future
● When will it be deployed?
○ Deployed in limited state (backwards
compatibility)
○ Plans to deploy with a large upgrade effort
(Rails 2.3 to 4.1) to be deployed in May,
pending final testing with a system-wide
migration (via nokogiri)
● What future work will be done with
Annotator?
○ Multi-media integration: video, audio

16. Challenges
● Handle versioned content. More importantly,
what user interface will enable versioning to be
widely adopted in the context of H2O?
● H2O has desire to represent content &
annotations in multiple formats (ie exportability).
How can we accomplish that? without
performance suck?

17. Questions?
http://www.endpoint.com/ steph@endpoint.com