Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, S-CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata and is trainable for a specific domain. Annotating web

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitutes the basis for the Semantic Web. Annotating web documents is one of the major techniques for creating metadata on the Web. However, annotation tools so far are restricted in their capabilities of providing richly interlinked and truely machine-understandable data. They basically allow the user to annotate with plain text according to a template structure, such as Dublin Core. We here present CREAM (Creating RElational, Annotationbased Metadata), a framework for an annotation environment that allows to construct relational metadata, i.e. metadata that comprises class instances and relationship instances. These instances are not based on a fix structure, but on a domain ontology. We discuss some of the requirements one has to meet when developing such a framework, e.g. the integration of a metadata crawler, inference services, document management and information extraction, and describe its implementation, viz. Ont-O-Mat a component-based, ontology-driven annotation tool.

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata. While the annotation mode of CREAM allows to create metadata for existing web pages, the authoring mode lets authors create metadata --- almost for free --- while putting together the content of a page. As a particularity of our framework, CREAM allows to create relational metadata, i.e. metadata that instantiate interrelated definitions of classes in a domain ontology rather than a comparatively rigid template-like schema as Dublin Core. We discuss some of the requirements one has to meet when developing such an ontology-based framework, e.g. the integration of a metadata crawler, inference services, document management and a meta-ontology, and describe its implementation, viz. Ont-O-Mat a component-based, ontology-driven Web page authoring and annotation tool.

Creating metadata by annotating documents is one of the major techniques for putting machine understandable data on the Web. Though there exist many tools for annotating web pages, few of them fully support the creation of semantically interlinked metadata, such as necessary for a truely Semantic Web. In this paper, we present an ontology-based annotation environment, OntoAnnotate, which offers comprehensive support for the creation of semantically interlinked metadata by human annotators.

Personalized Web applications automatically adapted for different clients and user preferences gain more importance. Still, there are barely technologies to compensate the additional effort of creating, maintaining and publishing such Web content. To address this problem, this paper introduces a declarative, componentbased approach for adaptive, dynamic Web documents on the basis of XML-technology. Adaptive Web components on different abstraction levels are defined in order to support effective Web page authoring and generation. Media components encapsulate concrete media assets by describing them with technical metadata. Content units group media components belonging together semantically by declaring their layout in a device-independent way. Finally, hierarchical document components playing a specific semantic role are defined. The hyperlink view for defining typed links is spanned over all component layers. Beside the reuse of both implementation artefacts and higher level concepts, the model also allows to define adaptive behavior of components in a fine-granular way. As a further benefit the support for ubiquitous collaboration via component annotations is introduced. Finally, the stepwise pipeline-based process of document generation is introduced and performance issues are sketched.

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata. While the annotation mode of CREAM allows to create metadata for existing web pages, the authoring mode lets authors create metadata -- almost for free -- while putting together the content of a page. As a

The Fluid Documents project has developed various research prototypes that show that powerful annotation techniques based on animated typographical changes can help readers utilize annotations more effectively. Our recently-developed Fluid Open Hypermedia prototype supports the authoring and browsing of fluid annotations on third-party Web pages. This prototype is an extension of the Arakne Environment, an open hypermedia application that can augment Web pages with externally stored hypermedia structures. This paper describes how various Web standards, including DOM, CSS, XLink, XPointer, and RDF, can be used and extended to support fluid annotations. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]:

Annotations are a natural way to record comments and ideas in specific contexts within a document. When people read, they often underline important parts of a document or write notes in the margin. While we typically think of annotating paper documents, systems that support annotating digital documents are becoming increasingly common. Annotations on digital documents are easily shared among groups of people, making them valuable for a wide variety of tasks, including online discussion and providing feedback. This research explores three issues that arise when using annotations for asynchronous collaboration. First, I present the results of using a prototype annotation system, WebAnn, to support online discussions in an educational setting. In a field study in a graduate class, students contributed twice as much content to the discussion using annotations compared to a traditional bulletin board. Annotations also encouraged a different discussion style that focused on specific points in the paper being discussed. The study results suggest valuable improvements to the annotation system and factors to consider when incorporating online discussion into a class. Second, I examine providing appropriate notification mechanisms to support online discussion using annotations. After studying notifications in a large-scale commercial system and finding them lacking, I designed and deployed enhancements to the system. A field study of the new notifications found that overall awareness of annotation activity on software specifications increased with my enhancements. The study also found that providing more information in notification messages, supporting multiple communication channels through which notifications can be received, and allowing customization of notification messages ...

The COLLATE system (collaboratory for annotation, indexing and retrieval of digitized historical archive material) provides film researchers with a collaborative environment in which historic documents about European films can be analysed, interpreted and discussed, using nested annotations and discourse structure relations among them. Annotations are metadata, and annotation threads form a hypertext containing positive and negative links, constituting a certain kind of context exploitable for document retrieval. In this paper, we discuss a solution for using annotations for information retrieval. To exploit annotation threads which consist of nested annotations and typed links between them, an annotation-based retrieval approach should have to cope with negative and contradictory statements. The nested annotation retrieval approach (NARA) is an approach addressing these issues. Based on this, we present NARAlog, an implementation using four-valued probabilistic datalog (FVPD), able to perform an in-depth analysis of annotation threads and to deal with contradictory statements.

There have been recent improvements in document technologies like the standardization of object interfaces to access and manipulate the properties of web documents. There has also been significant progress in pen based computing for recognition of digital ink in desktops, tablets and handheld devices. These have necessitated a need for further research on annotation architectures for digital documents, specifically penbased annotation systems. This paper presents an attempt to leverage the new standards of DHTML and W3C DOM that are being gradually implemented by popular browsers, to build a prototype of an ink annotation system with common components across browsers. One of the primary goals in this study is to semantically link ink data with underlying document elements like text and images. The system has three components: a) Ink capture and rendering b) Ink Understanding, which recognizes and associates ink with the underlying document and c) Ink storage and retrieval. 1.