[annotator-dev] Technical Description of Annotator as part of Prize application

[Rufus Pollock]

On 25 July 2011 16:59, James Harriman-Smith
<james.harriman-smith at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> Along with a friend in the Public Domain Working Group, I've been preparing
> an application for a prize called 'inventing the future' as a way of
> promoting the annotator. One section of the form requires a one-page
> technical description of how the annotator works, and I wondered if you,
> Nick, or someone else on this list, could provide it. The description must
> comprise of two elements:
> - the details (the form has 'technical features and components')
> - a little on how such technology is innovative.

See answers below. Let me know if these are sufficient. I guess we
could probably add these to github wiki too ...

[...]

Rufus

Technical Details of the Annotator

The Annotator project provides a suite of tools and services for easy
online, inline “annotation” of online texts. The annotation service
provides for collaborative research, personal and social note-taking,
a modern approach to copy-editing, with (almost) no restrictions on
the location of the annotated text.

Specifically the project has:

* Open annotation protocol - simple JSON and REST-based

* Javascript library utilizing this protocol which adds annotation
support into any web-page with one line of javascript (or a
bookmarklet). This deals with the idiosyncrasies of different
browsers, and provides a UI for creating and interacting with
annotations.

* Backend annotation store where annotations are persisted and which
can provide third-party websites with storage for annotations on their
own texts. This is a server platform for storing annotations and
managing authorisation of users creating annotations. This platform
serves two main purposes: a) acting as a Service Provider for
Consumers such as Open Shakespeare, Open Data Commons, P2PU, etc.
These projects will provide their users with texts to be annotated,
and these annotations will be stored by the Service Provider b) Acting
as a web application where users can sign up to store their
annotations on websites across the web. They will be able to install a
bookmarklet on their browser which will inject relevant code into any
page, allowing them to create annotations and save them (via CORS) to
the annotation service.

A (fairly) recent blog post:
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/05/12/the-annotator-preview/

## How it is innovative

The Annotator is the only opensource up-to-date library that delivers
easy, online annotation in a standards compliant, cross-browser
manner.

Prior to Annotator there were no good opensource tools out there to do
annotation across the web. There are several commercial offerings
(e.g. annotation in Google Docs), and there have been open source
attempts such as W3C’s Annotea, FSF’s Stet, marginalia, and co-ment
but none of these achieve all the goals we set out above. In addition,
many of the above are built for relatively small documents -- Stet was
designed for receiving comments on the then-draft GPLv3 -- scaling to
annotations across an entire Shakespeare play is a different matter
entirely.

There are several recent and emerging technologies (Cross-Origin
Resource Sharing, HTML5’s postMessage) which make annotation across
the web achievable for the first time. The tools described above make
use of the best of these in service of this goal.