All knowledge, annotated

Presenter: Dan Whaley (Hypothes.is, USA)

Abstract:
This August the W3C chartered the Web Annotation Working Group, based around an RDF data model called Open Annotation, which is rapidly being integrated into new open source tools and software libraries and adopted by a diverse cross-section of scholars, scientists, educators and others. The potential is to create a new layer over the web as we know it, enabling a rich set of interactive capabilities that until now have not been possible. This talk will provide an overview of the history behind annotation as an essential idea of the web, demonstrate some of the ways its being used and suggest plans for further development.

Transcript

1. What the #%*&!
   is the Semantic
   Web?
   

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2. “The Semantic Web is a collaborative
   movement led by international standards
   body the World Wide Web Consortium
   (W3C).[1]
   ...
   By encouraging the inclusion of semantic
   content in web pages, the Semantic Web
   aims at converting the current web,
   dominated by unstructured and semi-
   structured documents into a ‘web of data’.”
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
   

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3. How can we give
   every user a voice on
   every document?
   (and maintain high signal vs noise!)
   

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4. What are the basic
   building blocks we
   need?
   

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6. Trailblazing - What a Memex machine might look like
   

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7. Transclusion - Project Xanadu, Imagined 1960, Shipped June 2014
   

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8. Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.htm
   One must
   also be able
   to annotate
   links, as well
   as nodes, ...
   ”
   “
   

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12. w3.org/annotation
    (Est. August 19, 2014)
    

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13. Why will this succeed... now?
    (or, why won’t we just fail miserably?)
    

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14. Annotation is all around us.
    

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20. ... “Although the screen-view PDF cannot be
    printed, it can be annotated — which the
    publisher says will provide a way for
    scientists to collaborate by sharing their
    comments on manuscripts.”
    http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460
    

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21. Organizations building standards-
    compliant applications
    

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27. /NeutrinoChasers
    /arXiv
    /MIT-Phys332
    @dwhly + @tilgovi
    Reader
    

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29. A non-profit project to
    enable community
    moderated annotation of
    the world’s knowledge.
    

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31. An annotation
    target
    address message
    

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32. target
    (specific
    location)
    message
    

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33. Digital annotations are addressable
    http://domain/path
    

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34. Now
    

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35. Blog “B”
    Document “A”
    Coming Soon
    

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36. Blog “B”
    Document “A”
    

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37. Blog “B”
    Document “A”
    

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38. Blog “B”
    17m 32s
    

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39. Blog “B”
    

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40. It’s like the web.
    • Interoperable
    • Decentralized
    • Open source
    • (Hopefully) backwards
    compatible
    

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41. Possible features
    • Groups
    • Image & video annotation
    • Moderation, voting, flexible
    peer-review models
    • Automated spam detection
    • Copy-editing features (resolve)
    • Semantic tagging & external
    taxonomies
    • Offline functionality
    

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42. What are the powerful,
    semantic-like things?
    • User-driven linking
    • Robust, precise anchors
    • Media-rich bodies
    • Semantic tags
    • Machine-generated annotations
    • Support for a wide range of
    document and media formats
    • Interoperable data format with
    a set of quality open-source libs
    

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43. In Implementation
    (partial list)
    

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44. Demo
    

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