Annotating, the act of associating one piece of information with one (or more) other piece(s) of information, is an active part of the way that researchers work with data and has been the subject of discussion at several publishing related conferences recently. We all do it in the physical form for ourselves, increasingly we add comments to documents electronically and these become part of the open electronic record. On 9th April and 6th May Phase III of the Open Annotation Data Model & Ontology was published and rolled-out by Open Annotation Community Group at events at Stanford University and University of Maryland. These events will be followed by a third event to be held at the University of Manchester on 24th June 2013 when implementers, developers, and information managers will be able to see existing annotation services which have been built using the open annotation model.
Developed by
the Open Annotation Community Group (“OA” not to be confused with Open Access) this is one of a number of initiatives addressing how annotation fits in with online publication
of research through online journals and books, repositories, databases and
social networks by working towards a common, RDF-based specification for
annotating digital resources. Paolo Ciccarese,
Chair of the Group and a name that recurs through the various meetings came to
my attention at the BTPDF2 conference in March when he spoke on
Interoperability for Scholarly Annotation and the desire for a uniform,
pervasive method for describing a variety of resources, in this case using the DOMEO annotation toolkit.
At the same meeting Peter Brantley described the Hypothes.is open annotation
tool for the collaborative evaluation of information which is also based on the
draft standard.
More
recently Todd Carpenter (Executive Director of NISO which itself has a project
on annotation)
provided an excellent report in The Scholarly Kitchen on the iAnnotate
meeting which took place in San Francisco in April 2013. Significantly, while
much of the recent discussion tends to focus on the STM fields, this meeting
featured a number of examples of annotation from the social sciences and
humanities such as MapHub and Pelagios.
Todd
highlighted well the issues inherent in annotating digital items, particularly matching-problems
and locating reference points which can be anchored in terms of time and
location. In some ways telling of the need for solutions is the comments
discussion which follows Todd’s piece which details the problems that exist and
which are themselves examples of annotation. He points out that the very design
of the comments on the blog mean that his response to a comment may be tied to
that comment, but cannot be tied directly to other comments that he may also
reference in his response and as annotations cannot be tied to what people might
be saying on another service.
One point that remains to be decided in setting standards for open annotation is whether to develop new tools such
as ReadCube (Nature Publishing Group) or Utopia Documents which allow you to read and annotate articles, allow publisher specific
annotation tools to become standard features or should we be looking at other new
publishing tools like Authorea which suggest alternative ways of making collaboration on scholarly articles
simpler. Whatever the outcome, I agree with Todd that the scholarly publishing
community, the users, need to focus more attention on annotation services that
are being developed, many by researchers themselves.
