AnT&CoW: Share, Classify and Elaborate Documents by means of Annotation

As collective and mediated work spread out, digital data, and particularly documents, become predominant. In this paper, we describe how to support document management and especially document classification within a mechanical engineering design team working in an asynchronous and distributed way. The team members exchange comments to plan their project, to share documents, and to elaborate new documents. These comments are annotations linked together and linked to document(s). Annotations enable users to understand who is playing which role in the project and how collaborators understand a document and classify it. Observing this team led us to design an annotation tool (AnT&CoW) that we have implemented to support its collective activity. We conclude this article by focusing on the classification functionality, based on the use of natural language processing tools.