[okfn-discuss] Re: Marginalia

Wed Jan 24 18:28:39 UTC 2007

Dear Geof,

I hope you won't mind me cc'ing the OKFN discuss list on this (by the 
way, you'd be more than welcome to join, see 
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss).

First off, great to hear from you -- I'd been planning to write to you 
for the last couple of weeks about marginalia specifically web 
annotation in general and marginalia specifically. I don't know how much 
of the discussion on the list you saw but the we've been looking at 
marginalia in order to integrate it into the web interface for open 
shakespeare:

http://demo.openshakespeare.org/

Our first step was to port the backend code (i.e. the web annotation 
store REST interface) to python which we've now done, see:

<http://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/annotater/trunk/>

Coming from this was a general discussion of annotation which for ease 
of reading I've just posted at:

http://blog.okfn.org/2007/01/24/thinking-about-annotation/

Inspired by your own use of Atom a particular focus was whether one 
could agree on a simple set of core attributes defining an annotation as 
this would the allow one to plug and play with regard to the front and 
back-end (i.e. one could have different annotation user interfaces each 
using the same store and conversely different stores for the same 
front-end).

Geof Glass wrote:
> Hi Rufus,
 >
> I'm the author of Marginalia, and stumbled upon your discussion on
> the Nabble forums.  I've been working on some improvements to the
> software, and just uploaded a new release.  For long documents, the
> performance improvements are essential.  However, the newest version

That will be very useful for open shakespeare.

> doesn't support IE (there's no problem in principle, it's just a
> matter of IE's terrible debugging environment and my attention being
> mostly elsewhere).  See my blog post on the matter:

> http://www.geof.net/blog/2007/01/22/marginalia-release

I completely understand regarding IE -- I'd been doing some playing 
around with getting cross-browser support for range operations when I 
discovered your work. Of course it would be nice to have IE support, 
it's definitely one of the things that set marginalia apart.

> Here's my brief post about the OJS plug-in, which shows how to
> integrate with a system (it's much cleaner than Moodle) and
> demonstrates annotating and adding hyperlinks to long documents:
> 
> http://www.geof.net/blog/2007/01/24/ojs-marginalia-release

I'll take a look. By the way have you thought of putting this stuff in a 
publicly-accesible source-code repository?

Regards,

Rufus