Annotea Project

Overview

Annotea is a LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations. By annotations we mean comments, notes, explanations, or other types of external remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document without actually needing to touch the document. When the user gets the document he or she can also load the annotations attached to it from a selected annotation server or several servers and see what his peer group thinks.

Annotea is open; it uses and helps to advance W3C standards when possible. For instance, we use an RDF based annotation schema for describing annotations as metadata and XPointer for locating the annotations in the annotated document.

Annotea is part of the Semantic Web efforts. The annotations are stored in annotation servers as metadata and presented to the user by a client capable of understanding this metadata and capable of interacting with an annotation server with the HTTP service protocol.

The first client implementation of Annotea is W3C's Amaya editor/browser. Nothing prevents other clients from implementing these capabilities too. The current Amaya user interface for annotations is presented in the Amaya documentation

Learn more

You can find out more from documents that explain Annotea.

News

• 11 January, 2002. The JavaScript bookmarklet bug was fixed.
• 10 January, 2002. Our JavaScript bookmarklet has a bug that is exposed by the new server code running on annotest.w3.org. It is not displaying annotation properties served by annotest.w3.org correctly at the moment.
• 20 December, 2001. The quick tutorial for using annotations in Amaya was updated to include a section about replies.
• 17 December, 2001. The Annotea client in Amaya was extended to support annotations on annotations. We also support a new RDF schema so that users can reply to annotations. The replies are shown as a discussion thread. For more information, visit the Amaya home page.

How to ...

Use annotations

Read how to use annotations with Amaya and the W3C public annotation service.

Install your own server

It is also possible to install your own annotation server. Read the Annotea service installation instructions for further information.

Write new clients

You can write new clients, plugins or proxies that communicate with the annotation servers. You only need to follow the Annotea protocols and understand the annotation schema. See the list of existing clients. If you are an Annotea developer, please send us information of your client.

Annotea components

Servers

W3C offers a public annotation service for testing purposes at http://annotest.w3.org/annotations. Please read theAcceptable Use Policy. As this is a trial service W3C does not guarantee that it will store annotations permanently.

Others are strongly encouraged to start their own Annotea servers.

Clients

These clients are currently known to us.

• Amaya.
  Provides a native support for Annotea, for both publishing, querying, and discussion threads.
• Annotea bookmarklet.
  We have done some work on JavaScript interfaces to Annotea using bookmarklets. This approach only provides document-level annotations and not fine-grained annotations that are possible with Amaya. However, the JavaScript bookmarklets should work with any browser that supports JavaScript. See Interfacing Annotea Via JavaScript for more information.
• Annozilla
  Uses Annotea within Mozilla.
• Snufkin
  Uses Annotea with IE

Give us feedback

Feedback on the service in general can be sent to www-annotation, a publicly archived mailing list (you can also subscribe to the list). This list is also for discussions about annotation services and approaches in general.

Amaya bugs and Amaya related information can be reported as usual to the Amaya mailing lists.