Last week we pointed out that a W3C workshop about web annotation would be taking place today in San Francisco and
The workshop (hosted by Hypothes.is) is now underway and a live video stream is available here and also embedded below.
Also available is a today’s meeting agenda and the submissions/position papers by those who are speaking.
The Twitter hashtag is #ianno14
Here’s a Brief Overview:
Annotation currently lacks a structured approach. Comments are siloed inside the blog or comment system hosted and controlled by the publisher of the original document, or inside an ebook reader. They aren’t readily available for syndication or aggregation, and it’s difficult to find more comments by an insightful author if they are scattered around different places on the web. Worthwhile commentary is obscured by trolling, spam, or trivial comments. These are challenges both social and technical.
Other problems are purely technical: interchange formats need to be agreed upon; privacy and security of comments need to be preserved; styling highlighted content across element boundaries is tricky; and finally, anchoring a passage when you don’t control the original document, or when it has a multipage or single page view, or when it has newer versions or has otherwise changed from when the annotation was made, is a hard problem, and lies at the heart of annotations.
These requirements should be met across document types, reading systems, JavaScript libraries, and disciplines of study or entertainment. This workshop will focus primarily on the technical issues, with an emphasis on pragmatic solutions.
We want to identify the biggest challenges, most compelling use cases, and most promising solutions for standardization.
About Gary Price
