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I recently discovered Web Annotations:
https://www.w3.org/annotation/
The basic idea is very simple. An annotation is just a document that
is in some sense "about" another document, or a part of another
document. Thus annotations could be used for replies to blog posts, or
comments on news articles, or reviews of products, or marginalia for
historical texts. Any sort of commentary on any sort of document can
theoretically be represented as an annotation.
Of course, you've always been able to write a page of HTML containing
text about something else on the Web, with a link to that other thing.
What makes annotations different is that this semantic relationship
(this document is *about* that one) is encoded in a specified,
JSON-based format, so that "machines" can discover and know about the
relationship and do interesting things with it. Thus they are part of
the semantic Web.
An annotation has a *target*, which is the document (or document part)
which the annotation is "about"; and it has a *body*, which is the
content of the annotation. Both are identified by generalized URLs
(bodies can optionally just be a string). A few other fields identify
various metadata, like the type, format, and language of the body and
target. This is a simple, very general data model that can represent
pretty much any kind of connection between texts.
An important advantage of annotations over plain hyperlinks is that
they can identify *parts* of the target document in a fairly
fine-grained way, using selectors that are already common Web
technologies (e.g. CSS selectors). Thus annotations are particularly
useful for making commentary on longer documents.
For me, the most exciting applications of annotations fall broadly in
the category of collaborative research.
Research that consists of commentary on other research is an ancient
and important cultural practice: there are many texts of ancient Greek
philosophy, for example, that were lost, and we only know about them
because they were quoted or paraphrased by later authors writing their
own commentary. We accumulate knowledge by having an ongoing
conversation with past work.
But commentary is limited by the problem of *forward search*. How do
you find out what other people have already said and done in response
to a given piece of work? How can you gather all the existing
commentary about a particular document, or part of that document? This
has historically been very difficult, and remains difficult today,
though tools like Google Scholar have started to make it easier.
Web Annotations could change this. When a Web server serves up a
document, it can specify a URL for an annotation container for that
document. Using this mechanism, your browser can find annotations that
have already been made, and allow you to create new ones.
Here's an example. Suppose a historical text has been newly scanned,
and the scans are published on the Web. Different researchers can then
create:
as Web Annotations. They can all do this asynchronously, in the course
of their normal research. But as they publish those annotations, others
will be able to see them and benefit from that work. That will save
effort on tedious tasks like transcription and translation. It will
make it easier to discover relevant research that has already been
done. And it will help colleagues with common interests find each other.
As someone who does this kind of research, I'm excited to see how this
will develop. There are still lots of problems to solve, but there's
now a standard to build on.
If you're interested in learning more, here are the relevant
specifications by the W3C, which are fairly readable:
The W3C Annotations Working Group
Here are two clients demonstrating the idea, though I don't think
either of them is using the actual W3C protocol or data model: