{This section is incomplete and will remain that way.}

Public Annotation Systems Related Work

The previous section discusses the introductory material associated with my public annotation systems design paper.

If you are already familiar with the current annotation state-of-the-art, you might want to skip over this section and go directly to the section on annotation authoring issues.

Where did the idea for public annotation system come from?

What was the genesis for my particular kind of public annotations:

In his book, Literaty Machines, Ted Nelson describes the Xanadu project, an electronic publishing system whereby people can publish, read, annotate, an receive royalties for electronic documents. Central to the Xanadu project was the need to provide a system whereby people could easily mark-up one another's documents.
In a talk given by K. Eric Drexler at Sun in the late 1980's, Eric mentioned a concept that intrigued me. Namely, Eric postulated that the network of the future was going to populated with large amounts of low quality information, with small amounts of high quality information. How would people find the higher quality information? Eric suggested the concept of voting on links between documents to solve this problem. High quality links would tend to get a lot of `Yes' votes and people would follow them. I do not know if the idea of voting on links originated with Eric or whether he got the idea from somebody else. Anyhow, I got the idea of adding link voting to public annotation systems from K. Eric Drexler's talk.

Annotations with NCSA Mosaic

The ever popular NCSA Mosaic program has three forms of annotations -- private, workgroup, and public. These three forms of Mosaic annotations are discussed below:

Private Annotations

Mosaic private annotations allow an individual user to associate a message with a given URL. Whenever the URL is displayed by the user's instance of Mosaic, the annotation is displayed at the bottom of the document. The implementation of private annotations is quite trivial, the URL to annotation maps are kept in a sub-directory of the user's home directory.

Given that private annotations require no additional setup prior to use, they are fairly commonly used.

Workgroup Annotations

Mosaic workgroup annotations require that a group of people mutually agree upon a server that is going to maintain their group annotations. Next, all of the members of the workgroup set up the Mosaic so that it always queries a central annotation server prior to displaying any document. If a given URL has an annotation at the central workgroup annotation server, the annotation is displayed at the bottom of the document.

Mosaic workgroup annotations are infrequently used because:

they require prior setup,
you can only be in one workgroup at a time,
the workgroup annotation server must be queried for all documents, thereby increasing the latency from the time a user clicks on a hypertext link until the new document is displayed.

Public Annotations

To the best of my knowledge Mosaic public annotations simply never worked. It is unclear to me if the Mosaic design team ever had a viable design public annotations.

One nice thing about Mosaic annotations is that the user interface is natural and easy-to-use. The user simply clicks on the [Annotate] menu bar and an annotation ...

(More description of Mosaic Annotations go here.)

WIT

(Describe WIT here.)

E-mail and Newsgroups

(Describe E-mail and newsgroups here.)

This file, version 1.4 of related_work.html, was last updated at 21:24:55 on 95/09/15.