Annotation

We want to support annotation of any document, in a generalized way that can be supported by a unified aggregation and sharing system (where annotations/comments are similar to other objects in the object store). Media that should support annotation include documents and images; perhaps also any webpage or item viewed through a browser. In the extreme one can imagine adding notes to any moment in time using a laptop; associated as well as possible with a specific item with its own identifier, or a specific activity, or at least a combination of timestamp and screenshot and context.

We should support elegant libraries for displaying aggregated notes; levels of publicity (and perhaps ways to change this after the fact for clusters of notes) and ways to highlight annotations and reviews as they take place.

See content stamping for a specific kind of annotation that supports reviewing.

Sharing

Sharing annotations back and forth via browser isn't trivial. Sometimes you want to have a notebook with a document and comments, all together. How does that get passed back and forth? Are notes inline or their own objects? Is this affected by the people sharing having previously both owned copies of the uncommented book?

Aggregation

When annotations are separate from the underlying work, one can see a constellation of notes from many people. A few views which we want to readily support:

• no comments
• my own comments
• comments from a group (myself/class/teachers)
• all comments
• new comments

Types of annotation to support:

• point-and-click annotation associated with a spot on an image or page
• selection annotation associated with a string in a document or region in an image
• block annotation associated with a paragraph or block in a document or region in an image
• document-level annotation such as tags or reviews