Discerning the Intellectual Focus of Annotations
Jacob Jett, Timothy W. Cole, David S. Dubin, Allen H. Renear · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2016
Much attention has been given to strategies for anchoring annotations in digital documents, but very little to identifying what the annotation is actually about. We may think of annotations as being about their anchors, but that is not typically the case. Two annotations may have the same anchor, such as a string of characters, but one annotation is about the sentence represented by that string and the other about the claim being made by that sentence. Identifying targets and making this information available for computational processing would provide improved support for a variety of information management tasks. We discuss this problem and explore a possible extension to the W3C Web Annotation Data Model that would help with annotation target identification.