Web annotation

A web annotation is an online annotation associated with a web resource, typically a web page. With a Web annotation system, a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without modifying the resource itself. The annotations can be thought of as a layer on top of the existing resource, and this annotation layer is usually visible to other users who share the same annotation system. In such cases, the web annotation tool is a type of social software tool. For Web-based text annotation systems, see Text annotation.

Web annotation can be used for the following purposes:

Definition

Annotations can be considered an additional layer with respect to comments. Comments are published by the same publisher who hosts the original document. Annotations are added on top of that, but may eventually become comments which, in turn, may be integrated in a further version of the document itself.[1]

Standardisation efforts

The W3C has a Web Annotation Working Group which is working on 3 Candidate Recommendations:

The W3C also had a previous web annotation standardisation effort, Annotea (see below), which was conceived of as part of the semantic web.

Comparison of web annotation systems

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Many of these systems require software to be installed to enable some or all of the features below. This fact is only noted in footnotes if the software that is required is additional software provided by a third party.

Features

Annotation system Private notes Private group notes Public notes Notification Highlighting Formatted text Archives Viewing annotations License Notes
A.nnotate Yes Yes No Yes[2] Yes No Yes Proprietary Can annotate PDF, ODF, .doc, .docx, images, as well as web pages (but only a limited number in the free version)
Annotary Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Includes social features, following, and a social feed of notes. Unlimited and free bookmarking, annotating, and collaboration.
Axiom[3] Yes Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Proprietary Axiom provides a better workflow to manage digital documents. It is a cloud-based collaboration platform that allows users to organize and annotate (mark-up) documents, web-pages and even videos. These digital assets and annotations can be shared to facilitate real-time collaboration. It empowers users to arrange their documents intuitively and it uses bookshelves to organize the documents, as opposed to the traditional file-folder system. Users can annotate using the pen, highlighter or sticky notes. These annotations can be labelled such that the tags can be used to cross-reference across all types of documents (including videos), which allows the user to manage their knowledge effectively. Axiom is also a social platform, and permits sharing of annotations and documents with others, making it easier to collect feedback on documents, web-pages or videos.
ChimeIn No No Yes Yes No No A browser extension available for Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Works as a standalone app on iOS and Android. Full social integration and notifications in email and push messages.
Delicious Yes No Yes No No No Proprietary 1000 character limit per page per user
Diigo Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Proprietary Public annotations are only allowed for established users. Group tag dictionary feature to encourage tagging consistently within a group.
DocentEDU Yes Yes No Yes No No Chrome, Firefox Proprietary
Firefox (built-in) Yes No No No No No No Bookmark properties MPL "Description" and "tags" fields of bookmarks provide this
Genius No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Chrome, via genius.it Proprietary Genius has a Chrome Extension, an iPhone App, and a subdomain (genius.it/) which you can prepend to any domain to annotate. This is in addition to their website, genius.com, where users can annotate lyrics, literature, news, and other categories.
Hypothes.is Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes via.hypothes.is Open-source In February 2015, different features are announced,[4] such as private group annotation, semantic tagging, moderation, etc.
Marky Yes No No No Yes Yes GPL Marky is a Web-based multi-purpose document annotation application (Social Admin-annotators application). You only need a server with php technology and one database to annotate documents with a browser. The annotation component handles both plain text and HTML documents. Web technologies, such as HTML5, CSS3, Ajax and JQuery, to offer an intuitive What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor. Admins can enter documents to be annotated by annotators and get annotations for relevant terms.Marky also offers the possibility of obtaining substantial data about the annotations, as the annotation agreement between users, rounds, F-score and more. this is a tool that allows annotate multiple annotation classes, each with a different color. Developed in 2013.
Org-mode (with extensions) Yes No No[5] No[6]No Yes No Emacs-based; requires technical knowledge to set up; not as user-friendly as some other solutions; non-Latin characters allowed in notes but not in tags
Pundit Yes No Yes No Yes No Chrome, HTML Embed AGPL 3.0[7] It's a suite of two Chrome Extensions for web annotation (Pundit Annotator and Pundit Annotator Pro) and a web application to review and manage annotations. Supports highlight and comment of text fragments in web pages. Supports the creation of semantic annotations using text fragments, whole web pages, Linked Open Data entities (e.g. DBpedia.org). The semantic annotator comes with a default ontology of predicates. Pundit can also be Embedded in HTML pages.
scrible Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Proprietary 500MB archive storage in free version. Annotations do not always appear at same horizontal position in archived version.
Stickis Yes Yes Yes Yes No[8] Yes Proprietary Blogs subscribed via Stickis will appear as annotations when they link to the current page. Any web content, including YouTube videos, can be inserted into a note.
yellow penNo No No No Yes No Browser extension for Google Chrome. You can point out important information in long webpages by highlighting text with your mouse. And you can share this highlighted version of page (with special short link) in social media, e--mail, IM etc. or just bookmark it. (By Marker.to)

Discontinued web annotation systems

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

See also

References

  1. Doug Schepers. "Web Annotation Architecture". W3C. Retrieved 29 July 2016.
  2. See A.nnotate notifications
  3. http://www.axiomnetworks.ca/
  4. Hypothes.is roadmap
  5. Technically, public annotations are possible via the "publish to HTML" feature of org mode -- but no method for notifications or discovery of public annotations written by others is currently known.
  6. But local annotations can be exposed to a firefox browser using Fireforg.
  7. "License - Pundit". Pundit. Retrieved 2016-01-27.
  8. Instead of highlighting a web page, you drag selected content from the webpage into the note.
  9. Yee, Ka-Ping (2002). "CritLink: Advanced Hyperlinks Enable Public Annotation on the Web". CiteSeerX: 10.1.1.5.5050.
  10. Third Voice Trails Off, Wired News, April 4, 2001
  11. Wikalong Firefox Addon, Oct 1, 2006
  12. Wikalong website
  13. Farewell Fleck.com, "The Next Web", May 10, 2010
  14. "Comment system". Free Software Foundation. 11 May 2011. Retrieved 28 July 2016.
  15. "Box acquires Crocodoc to turn all those docs you upload into HTML5 masterpieces". VentureBeat. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 12 June 2016.
  16. "Box is Shutting Down Crocodoc Personal and Webnotes on November 1". VentureBeat. 5 August 2015. Retrieved 12 June 2016.

Further reading

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