A historical and contemporary study on annotations to derive key features for systems design

Abstract

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

A probabilistic framework for information modelling and retrieval based on user annotations on digital objects

“…Annotations in form of interpretations are used, e.g., to understand classical literature 1 , legal texts, or religious books like the Bible or the Talmud (Fraenkel and Klein, 1999). These examples also show that the practise of annotation goes back to (at least) the Middle Ages; in fact, annotations can be found on historical documents, not only in the literary or theological field, but also for administrative and legal practise (Agosti et al, 2007a). The concept of annotation is best introduced by looking at common definitions.…”

“…As Agosti et al (2007a) point out, there are many other terms related with annotations, like footnote 2 , gloss (an explanation or interpretation of a word), jotting (a brief note), observation (comment or remark about the fact learnt from observation), postil (comment or marginal note), record (e.g., information about facts or events) or scholium (commentary or annotation, especially on classical text). Another kind of annotation are highlight annotations which mark important passages of a text (either by underlining them, drawing a circle around them or marking them with a highlighter).…”

“…As we elaborate later, annotations are an important kind of metadata attached to a document. On the collection level, annotations can be employed to link information resources, creating new explicit relationships between them Agosti et al, 2007a). Furthermore, annotations can support access and retrieval of the information sources managed in a digital library repository -the information contained in annotations may be important to judge the relevance of a document w.r.t.…”

“…Several studies have been performed to assist the design of digital library systems supporting annotations on the user level (Marshall, 1997(Marshall, , 1998, on the conceptual level (Agosti and Ferro, 2003;Agosti et al, 2004Agosti et al, , 2007a as well as on the system level (Agosti et al, 2005a. Current annotation research also deals with the question of how to anchor annotations to the passage they belong to (Bernheim Brush, 2002).…”

Annotation Search: The FAST Way

“…It can be noted as these different notions of annotation partially overlap or share commonalities. For a thorough review of the various viewpoints about annotations, please refer to [3,7].…”