Comment Anywhere Annotation Protocol Proposal

Introduction

The basic building block of this annotation proposal is the queryable Atom feed. Each user has their own feed, through which they publish annotations. This proposal includes definitions of:

1. Extensions to Atom to support publishing of annotations
2. A protocol for query publishing feeds
3. Protocols for integrating with web pages

Atom Extensions

Atom is a protocol for notifying of content that has been published. The canonical use case for Atom is weblogs - each time a new entry is published in a weblog, a new entry is added to an Atom feed. Clients can then query the feed to find these newly published entries.

This proposal reuses existing standards where possible.

Querying Publishing Feeds

Publishing feeds support a simple query protocol. It allows users and aggregators to retrieve entries in which they are interested without needing to retrieve every published entry.

Integrating with Web Pages

1. Trackbacks

What's Missing

Some areas that we haven't yet given a lot of thought to are:

1. identifying fragments of a page to which annotations apply.
2. how individuals publish annotations to their publishing feed.
3. the notion of work groups with a particular identity.
4. privacy - currently all annotations are public.

Background

Comment Anywhere grew out discussions between Alec Thomas and Alan Green about open and distributed social networks. We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of overlap between this proposal and the Original Annotation API Proposal.