Annotation technology

nnotation Technology is a systematized set of recommendations for design of successful advanced annotation software covering the architectural, functional and user-interface aspects. It is grounded in a careful examination of 17 existing systems accompanied by our own empirical study of annotation types, applications and desired functionality. To validate the recommendations of Annotation Technology, we have also developed Annotator, a system for making on-line annotations on arbitrary hypertext documents. Annotator offers some capabilities unavailable in existing systems. It has a proxy-based architecture for annotating documents over the web and sorting the comments in an annotation database. (C) 1999 Academic Press