Annotea shared bookmarks

Abstract

Traditional bookmark systems provide inadequate support for Web users with variety of devices including smart phones and their browsers. In addition, they offer very little support for sharing the bookmarks and topics between groups of users working together. Annotea annotations provide a means for users to share communication about Web documents by attaching external annotation metadata to the documents. Users can easily find annotations related to a document by using clients that present these annotations in the document context. Similarly, bookmarks can be thought of as kind of annotations that attach bookmark metadata to documents and help users find documents and informal categories or topics assigned to them. Our Annotea metadata storage and retrieval platform built on Semantic Web technologies now also supports bookmark metadata server. Clients may share, query and present the bookmarks and topics. Use of RDF metadata for bookmarks offers flexibility in connecting to other bookmark systems and to annotation functionality. The metadata is machine readable and can be converted from and to other bookmark formats. Metadata from several bookmark sources - either local or from selected bookmark servers - is trivial to merge by virtue of the underlying RDF-based data representation. It is also possible to add additional application- or user-dependent RDF properties such as links to formal ontologies to bookmarks and topics. Applications designed according to the principles of RDF will be able to accommodate this additional data even if the application can not present or edit these novel properties. The Annotea framework would also support objects that have a dual role as both bookmarks and annotations. In addition, other metadata based formats, such as RSS newsfeeds, could be presented as sources of Annotea shared bookmarks.