This article is a study of the themes and issues concerning the annotation of digital contents, such as textual documents, images, and multimedia documents in general. These digital contents are automatically managed by different kinds of digital library management systems and more generally by different kinds of information management systems.Even though this topic has already been partially studied by other researchers, the previous research work on annotations has left many open issues. These issues concern the lack of clarity about what an annotation is, what its features are, and how it is used. These issues are mainly due to the fact that models and systems for annotations have only been developed for specific purposes. As a result, there is only a fragmentary picture of the annotation and its management, and this is tied to specific contexts of use and lacks-general validity.The aim of the article is to provide a unified and integrated picture of the annotation, ranging from defining what an annotation is to providing a formal model. The key ideas of the model are: the distinction between the meaning and the sign of the annotation, which represent the semantics and the materialization of an annotation, respectively; the clear formalization of the temporal dimension involved with annotations; and the introduction of a distributed hypertext between digital contents and annotations. Therefore, the proposed formal model captures both syntactic and semantic aspects of the annotations. Furthermore, it is built on previously existing models and may be seen as an extension of them. ACM Reference Format:Agosti M. and Ferro N. 2007. A formal model of annotations of digital content.

This paper presents the results of our study regarding the different facets and ways of using annotations in both digital libraries and collaboratories. This study represents an innovative attempt at gathering methodological tools and synergies from both fields in order to effectively define a comprehensive model for annotations. Thus we propose a conceptual model for annotations in order to develop an annotation service that can be plugged into digital libraries and collaboratories. Finally, starting from our model, we introduce a search strategy for exploiting annotations in order to search and retrieve relevant documents for a user query.

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This paper discusses how to exploit annotations as a useful context in order to search and retrieve relevant documents for a user query. This paper provides a formal framework which can be useful in facing this problem and shows how this framework can be employed, by using techniques which come from the hypertext information retrieval and data fusion fields

This paper provides a comprehensive study on annotations by defining their contours and complexity. This work adds a new complementary approach to the usual case and user studies, and also investigates history in order to benefit from previous knowledge and our cultural heritage. This study emphasizes an aspect which has never previously been taken into account: the temporal dimension involved in annotations. Moreover, it discusses both the notion of hypertext between documents and annotations and the idea of annotations as context for documents. The study gives the necessary historical and cultural background to derive a set of key features of annotations that must be taken into account when designing systems that have to support the management of digital annotations on digital contents

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