Annotating digital libraries and electronic editions in a collaborative and semantic perspective

Abstract

The distinction between digital libraries and electronic editions is becoming more and more subtle. The practice of annotation represents a point of convergence of two only apparently separated worlds. The aim of this paper is to present a model of collaborative semantic annotation of texts (SemLib project), suggesting a system that find in Semantic Web and Linked Data the solution technologies for enabling structured semantic annotation, also in the field of electronic editions in Digital Humanities domain. The main purpose of SemLib is to develop an application so to make easy for developers the integration of annotation software in digital libraries, which are different both for technical implementations and managed contents, and provide to users, indifferently from their cultural backgrounds, a simple system which could be used as a front-end. We present, for this purpose, a final example of semantic annotation in a specific context: a digital edition of a literary text and the issues that an annotation task involves. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.