ANNOTIZER: USER-FRIENDLY WWW ANNOTATION SYSTEM FOR COLLABORATION IN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

This paper presents a new version of our WWW-based annotation system, Annotizer. Annotizer improves collaboration on the WWW by allowing users to create, share and search annotations on existing HTML WWW contents. The focus of this paper is on the design and implementation of the second version of the Annotizer specifically targeting educational and research settings. The two general questions we explore are: (1) How useful are WWW annotations and what purpose do they serve? And (2) what are design and implementation issues for delivering a user-friendly WWW annotation system? The second version of the Annotizer is improved in that it allows the annotation of any WWW page (not only those from the Annotizer server domain) and it employs a much improved UI. While we believe that the Annotizer can be useful in variety of WWW collaborative applications, our initial target is users within the scientific and educational communities. The Annotizer requires no downloads and the annotations are stored in a central database allowing asynchronous adding, viewing and searching by all registered users. In this paper we present the motivation, new functionality, architecture and UI of Annotizer.