Annotate! Project Description

Web4Groups Working paper 1998.

Roland Alton-Scheidl, Wolfgang Gantner, Arno Senoner @ PUBLIC VOICE Labor

Annotate! is a service offered in the World Wide Web, which allows to search, read or write comments on any web page. The service is the result of the infiltration of an R&D project funded by the European Commission by key persons, that pushed this feature in the project consortium. PUBLIC VOICE Labor managed to become partner in a late project stage and was responsible for adapting the server software and to develop a universal front-end, the "Annotation Commander", which allows simple handling of annotation queries.

Until spring 1998, both the annotation service and the Web4Groups service, on which it is built on, have been under continuos development. A demo site has been set up for testing purposes at http://Web4Groups.at. However, both services have not yet been widely announced due to continuos improvement and bug-fixing efforts. The uniqueness of the Web4Groups service concept are distributed servers, which communicate using a peer-to-peer protocol. Such scalability is the precondition for a world wide annotation service, which shall be able to handle millions of annotations.

Annotate! has been submitted to the Prix Ars Electronica's jury for web projects, but is also a thematic contribution for this year's Ars Electronica Festival focussing on "InfoWar". The project goes inline with communication projects at PUBLIC VOICE Labor and its board members, Roland Alton-Scheidl, Wolfgang Gantner and Arno Senoner, who have been all working for and/or exhibited (media) art projects.

Tim Berners-Lee has again stressed in August 1996 in an article"The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future"the original intensions of the World-Wide Web: an information universe, where interaction is not reduced to mouse clicking. Perhaps it is not an accident, that he has written this paper soon after a conference on "Collaboration and the Web", where Roland Alton-Scheidl co-founded the W3C working group on "Annotation".

Bringing back interactivity to the Internet is a core goal of Annotate! Just like in the Internet's early days where nntp was the main application to exchange opinions. However, we are using the latest technologies: The annotation server supports HTML, MIME and http and is written in Java, whilst the Annotation Commander makes extensive use of Javascript.

Project History and Background

An annotation service allows any web user to start a forum which refers to a web page the user just visits. Various design issues have been discussed in a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium [4]. The active annotations approach, that make a user immediately aware of an annotation, are summarised in [2]. Up to now (spring 1998), no annotation concept is widely deployed due to scalability, performance, security and user acceptance barriers. It still remains a challenge to deploy such a service, preferably on a distributed server architecture, that can handle the vast amount of web pages available today. Palme [3] has drafted various ways for implementing the user interface of such a service in an early stage of the Web4Groups project. One approach suggested by him (1) was to extract the URL where the user has pointed his/her browser and a special software plugged to the browser navigates to the forum. However, both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have built-in security restrictions, that do not allow to send information about another open window (e.g. the URL) to another server. Another approach is, that "buttons" are added below the existing web page, which allow the user to lookup or start a forum. Following this approach, the buttons are either inserted

• (2a) by a proxy server (to be configured at the user's browser)
• (2b) by the creator manually (or with a script software that runs over all html pages in a directory or on a web site)
• (2c) by a proxy server near the web server (to be set up and maintained by the provider).

Using a proxy server (options 2a or 2c) may not be very well accepted by users as it slows down connections and it may have other side effects. After some tests, this development line has been stopped due to performance loss. We also know from user surveys, that users dislike very much customising the browser, which would be necessary with option 2a. However, all options (1, 2a, 2b, 2c) seemed not to gain user acceptance.

At this "dead-end" list of options PUBLIC VOICE Labor entered the consortium and developed the Annotation Commander. The Annotation Commander can be accessed via the tool bar of any Web4Groups server or at other URLs (eg http://thing.at/pvl/annotation/). This page opens a second window, which contains the annotations or allows to create one. The user can store this page also in the bookmarks list and may recall it whenever s/he needs it again to quickly search for annotations.
However, one problem remains: launching a search for annotations on an unmodified web page needs the user to copy its URL into the separate window of the annotation commander, which then connects to the next Web4Groups server and retrieves the annotations. Neither Java applets nor Javascript allow fetching the location info from another browser window due to security violation reasons.
The following JavaScript language elements are used in the Annotation Commander:

• open another browser window
• access to the history of actual page and possibility to skip back and forward
• use cookies to store user's preferences

How is Annotate being used at daily browsing?

1. The user is requested to put the Annotation Commander (http://thing.at/pvl/annotation/) into the bookmarks list.
   
2. Anytime, the user is browsing through the net and wants to know, if annotations to a certain web page exist, the user just selects the Annotation Commander bookmark.
   
3. The Annotation Commander page is loaded from the net (or could even be loaded from the local disk, if stored there).
   
4. Javascript opens immediately another window with the previous page, which is the page, to which the user wanted to know if a forum exists.
   
5. The user pastes the URL into the Annotation Commander's query field and submits a request to an appropriate Web4Groups server, whether a forum exists or if there are other forums near the requested page. If a forum exists, the annotations available are shown immediately.
   
6. The user can either join the discussion, select an appropriate, already existing discussion near the requested page or start a new forum.

A user will not be forced to enter a username or password, unless s/he is starting a new forum. In this case, the user shall log in at the Web4Groups server; however the forum will be started at a Web4Groups server near the original web site, due to performance and probability reasons for getting responses; such an algorithm has been already implemented into the servers.

Application fields and user roles

Annotate! can be used for several purposes. By writing annotation messages, visitors of a web page can give comments, explanations and additional information. Comments certainly may range from emotional expressions, rejections, suggestions to ratings or declarations of relevance. The messages may relate either to the content or may be directed publicly to the author of the web page which is annotated.

What are the social roles in an annotation procedure? First we have an author of a web page. This page is hosted at a server for which an administrator and possibly a webmaster are responsible for. Usually, there are visitors of the page that browse to that location. A subset of visitors are users, who read annotations and some of them will write annotations. One person will be the first who writes an annotation. This person is in the current implementation the organiser of the forum on that web page. Furthermore, we have administrators of Web4Groups servers, that can store annotations.

Potential role conflicts are between the author of the web page and the organiser of the annotation forum on that page. Therefore, a bidirect communication link between those two should be established: the author shall be notified of both the existence of the annotation forum and the email address of the organiser. We do not consider it for useful to assign the author automatically as organiser with the right to remove annotations and even the forum itself. However, the creator of the annotation forum may get in direct contact with the author, but remaining in the position of a moderator. An organiser still can assign other users as co-organisers with the same access rights, even the author him/herself, if applicable.

Future perspective

In April 1998 a half dozen Web4Groups servers in Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, Finland and France carry the load of annotations created by web users, many more shall come, as the server software is free for non-profit organisations. We are going to start a PR campaign at major new media magazines. The annotation service will be enhanced in future versions with a categorisation/keywording feature, so that users can find easier annotations of their interest fields. We are negotiating with sponsors that shall be shown on the Annotation Commander.

Rewards

12 European organisations from eight countries have worked in developing, testing and setting up the Web4Groups service network: Four partners are commercial organisations, four are representatives of user groups in different sectors (science, distance education, municipial administra-tion) and four are research organisations, among those PUBLIC VOICE Labor.

The project was administrated by Omega srl, an IT company based in Bologna. The Austrian Academy of Sciences' Research Unit for Socio-Economics was responsible for the integration of user needs and for the social assessment of the service concept. Stockholm`s Technical University is responsible for the group confer-encing database. Kapsch AG in Austria has developed a Java based web gateway and implemented together with Public Voice Labor a telephone and fax gateway and the annotation service. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences` Computer and Automation Institute carried out the technical implementation of the voting and rating mechanisms. Other partners either developed other modules (eg Joint Document Production Support by Eurecom, France) or represent user groups in the reaesrch, administratrion or SME sector.

Special thanks to Jacob Palme, who discussed with us implementation issues for the annotation service, Torgny Tholerus, our database expert, Samba Diallo, who developed the prototype for the web gateway, and Eduard Rysavy, who helped with server installation and adaption work. Roland Alton-Scheidl developed the Annotation Commander. Daniel LaLiberte from NCSA, the developer of HyperNews, discussed with us scalability and security concerns. Misha Glouberman asked important questions regarding access removal rights.

Finally, we have to thank the European Commission, DG XIII, for not stopping us developing subversive Internet application using their funds.

References

[1] GLOUBERMAN, Misha: Adding Comments to the Web
[2] HUMMES, Jacob &AMP Alain Karsenty, Bernard Merialdo, Active Annotations, 1997.
[3] PALME, Jacob: Linking conferences to web pages, Version 4, 960804, Web4Groups internal paper, 1996.
[4] W3C Annotation Working Group mailing list: www-annotation@w3c.org (400k archive)
[5] ALTON-SCHEIDL, Roland; SCHMUTZER, Rupert; SINT, Peter Paul; TSCHERTEU, Gernot (eds.): Voting, Rating, Annotation. Web4Groups and other projects. Oldenbourg Verlag, Wien Muenchen / OCG Verlag, Reihe 104, Wien, 1997.