Annotation evolution: how Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a change in annotation practice

Are Web 2.0 tools and technologies changing how and why scholars annotate their research sources? We begin to answer this question by assessing current technology and tools that support new functions for one of the most common scholarly research activity: taking notes. The results suggest a new approach to personalized information retrieval.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Annotation Search: the FAST Way

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThis paper discusses how annotations can be exploited to develop information access and retrieval algorithms that take them into account. The paper proposes a general framework for developing such algorithms that specifically deals with the problem of accessing and retrieving topical information from annotations and annotated documents

Shared Annotations: Attitudes and Behaviors of Scholars

Annotations, in the form of markings and comments on the text, are often part of scholarly work. Digital platforms increasingly allow these annotations to be shared in group and public environments. To explore scholars' current behavior and attitudes toward shared annotations, semi-structured interviews with 11 doctoral students in the life sciences were conducted. The findings suggest that socio-cognitive processes are integral to scholars' creation and use of shared annotations. This paper discusses common themes from the findings and their implications for effective design of annotation systems supporting scholarly communication

Engineering Annotations: A Generic Framework For Gluing Design Artefacts in Models of Interactive Systems

International audienceAlong the design process of interactive system many intermediate artefacts (such as user interface prototypes, task models describing user work and activities, dialog models specifying system behavior, interaction models describing user interactions …) are created, tested, revised and improved until the development team produces a validated version of the full-fledged system. Indeed, to build interactive systems there is a need to use multiple artefacts/models (as they provide a complementary view). However, relevant information for describing the design solution and/or supporting design decisions (such as rational about the design, decisions made, recommendations, etc.) is not explicitly capturable in the models/artefacts, hence the need for annotations. Multi-artefacts approaches usually argue that a given information should only be present in one artefact to avoid duplication and increase maintainability of the artefacts. Nonetheless, annotations created on one artefact are usually relevant to other artefacts/models. So that, there is a need for tools and techniques to coordinate annotations across artefacts/models which is the contribution of the present work. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach that was conceived to handle annotations in a systematic way along the development process of interactive systems. As part of the solution, we propose an annotation model built upon the W3C's Web Annotation Data Model. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by means of a tool suite featuring a plugin, which has been deployed and tested over the multi-artefacts. The overall approach is illustrated on the design of an interactive cockpit application performing two design iterations. The contribution brings two main benefits for interactive systems engineering: i) it presents a generic pattern for integrating information in multiple usually heterogenous artefacts throughout the design process of interactive systems; and ii) it highlights the need for tools helping to rationalize and to document the various artefacts and the related decisions made during interactive systems design. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human computer interaction (HCI

A historical and contemporary study on annotations to derive key features for systems design

This paper provides a comprehensive study on annotations by defining their contours and complexity. This work adds a new complementary approach to the usual case and user studies, and also investigates history in order to benefit from previous knowledge and our cultural heritage. This study emphasizes an aspect which has never previously been taken into account: the temporal dimension involved in annotations. Moreover, it discusses both the notion of hypertext between documents and annotations and the idea of annotations as context for documents. The study gives the necessary historical and cultural background to derive a set of key features of annotations that must be taken into account when designing systems that have to support the management of digital annotations on digital contents

Concepção, implementação e validação de um enfoque para integração e recuperação de conhecimento distribuído em bases de dados heterogêneas

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento, Florianópolis, 2010Com o crescimento da demanda e da composição de Bases de Conhecimento para os mais diversos fins e a sua disponibilização através da rede mundial de computadores, passou-se a observar a necessidade de organizar este conhecimento e também integrá-lo para possibilitar maior acessibilidade e facilidade na sua manutenção e utilização, devido à caracterização da disposição dispersa e o formato heterogêneo das referidas bases. Neste trabalho é proposto um sistema que efetua integração do conhecimento de bases de dados em contexto genérico, utilizando como estudo de caso o atendimento emergencial no CIT - Centro de Informações Toxicológicas de Santa Catarina - além de possibilitar a manutenção e manipulação deste artefato através do agrupamento de técnicas de recuperação de informação, aperfeiçoamento semântico, expansão de consulta, fonética em um único mecanismo. Foram avaliadas - através de uma revisão sistemática da literatura - as melhores opções disponibilizadas por estudos prévios em pesquisas realizadas nestas áreas a fim de encontrar a melhor combinação a ser utilizada no mecanismo, além da análise do produto final em um comparativo feito entre mecanismos previamente utilizados pelos profissionais no atendimento de urgência.With growth demand and composition of knowledge bases for different purposes and making them available through internet, it#s possible to see the need to organize this knowledge and also integrate it to provide greater accessibility and ease maintenance and use, due to the characterization of dispersed persistence and format of such heterogeneous databases. This dissertation proposes a system that performs integration of knowledge databases in generic context, using as a case study of emergency care at CIT - Toxicological Information Center of Santa Catarina - besides facilitating the maintenance and manipulation of the artifact by grouping techniques of information retrieval, semantic processing, query expansion, phonetics in a single mechanism. Were evaluated - through a systematic literature review - the best options available in previous studies on research conducted in these areas to find the best combination to be used in the mechanism, besides the analysis of the final product in a comparison made between mechanisms previously used by professionals in emergency care

Um Modelo para recuperação e comunicação do conhecimento em documentos médicos

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento, Florianópolis, 2011O grande número de informações disponíveis, que estão em diferentes fontes de dados, exige cada vez mais processamento dos motores de busca. Recuperar informações que estão nessas bases de dados com a melhor precisão possível é um dos desafios a serem alcançados dentro do contexto desta tese. Os registros clínicos médicos contêm uma imensa gama de informações, normalmente escritas em forma de texto livre e sem um padrão linguístico. Os médicos não escrevem os diagnósticos e os laudos do paciente com o uso de elementos de estilo, o que dificulta o processamento e a recuperação da informação por parte dos sistemas computacionais. Consequentemente, obter o conhecimento a partir desses dados não é uma tarefa fácil para um motor de busca. Este trabalho apresenta o desenvolvimento de um modelo, que permite recuperar o conhecimento de informações textuais em documentos médicos. Técnicas de expansão de pesquisas, que utilizam detecção de ativos de conhecimento da ontologia DeCS e de dicionários linguísticos, são utilizadas. O objetivo é ampliar o universo de pesquisa do usuário e criar uma base de conhecimento para permitir o seu reúso. A proposta de tese aqui apresentada difere dos anteriores porque a intenção é retornar às pesquisas dos usuários uma série de documentos médicos muito mais eficazes do que nas tradicionais ferramentas de busca. Com o intuito de melhorar os resultados de uma pesquisa, anotações semânticas e detecção de expressões negativas serão utilizadas para processar os textos médicos. O estudo de caso apresentado no final mostra que, dos dez primeiros resultados do modelo ora proposto, alcançou-se uma média de 90% de precisão, enquanto que o modelo booleano limitou-se a 60%, e com o diferencial de que no modelo tradicional, o usuário teve que refazer suas consultas várias vezes até chegar a um resultado satisfatório, ao passo que no modelo semântico obteve êxito já na primeira consulta. Justamente porque o usuário não encontrou uma resposta nas primeiras pesquisas no modelo booleano, os tempos de resposta médios foram de 49 minutos, contra 0,6 segundos do novo modelo. Conclui-se, dessa forma, que o usuário não precisará despender muito tempo para encontrar a informação ou não precisará procurar em diferentes bases de dados a fim de encontrar a informação necessária

Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries

A griotte in West African culture is a female professional storyteller, responsible for preserving a tribe's history and genealogy by relaying its folklore in oral and musical recitations. Similarly, Griotte is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to foster collaboration between tradition bearers, subject experts, and computer specialists in an effort to build high quality digital oral history collections. To accomplish this objective, this project preserves the primary strength of oral history, namely its ability to disclose "our" intangible culture, and addresses its primary criticism, namely its dubious reliability due to reliance on human memory and integrity. For a theoretical foundation and a systematic model, William Moss's work on the evidentiary value of historical sources is employed. Using his work as a conceptual framework, along with Semantic Web technologies (e.g. Topic Maps and ontologies), a demonstrator system is developed to provide digital oral history tools to a "sample" of the target audience(s). This demonstrator system is evaluated via two methods: 1) a case study conducted to employ the system in the actual building of a digital oral history collection (this step also created sample data for the following assessment), and 2) a survey which involved a task-based evaluation of the demonstrator system. The results of the survey indicate that integrating oral histories with documentary evidence increases the evidentiary value of oral histories. Furthermore, the results imply that individuals are more likely to use oral histories in their work if their evidentiary value is increased. The contributions of this research – primarily in the area of organizing metadata on the World Wide Web – and considerations for future research are also provided

A Probabilistic Framework for Information Modelling and Retrieval Based on User Annotations on Digital Objects

Annotations are a means to make critical remarks, to explain and comment things, to add notes and give opinions, and to relate objects. Nowadays, they can be found in digital libraries and collaboratories, for example as a building block for scientific discussion on the one hand or as private notes on the other. We further find them in product reviews, scientific databases and many "Web 2.0" applications; even well-established concepts like emails can be regarded as annotations in a certain sense. Digital annotations can be (textual) comments, markings (i.e. highlighted parts) and references to other documents or document parts. Since annotations convey information which is potentially important to satisfy a user's information need, this thesis tries to answer the question of how to exploit annotations for information retrieval. It gives a first answer to the question if retrieval effectiveness can be improved with annotations. A survey of the "annotation universe" reveals some facets of annotations; for example, they can be content level annotations (extending the content of the annotation object) or meta level ones (saying something about the annotated object). Besides the annotations themselves, other objects created during the process of annotation can be interesting for retrieval, these being the annotated fragments. These objects are integrated into an object-oriented model comprising digital objects such as structured documents and annotations as well as fragments. In this model, the different relationships among the various objects are reflected. From this model, the basic data structure for annotation-based retrieval, the structured annotation hypertext, is derived. In order to thoroughly exploit the information contained in structured annotation hypertexts, a probabilistic, object-oriented logical framework called POLAR is introduced. In POLAR, structured annotation hypertexts can be modelled by means of probabilistic propositions and four-valued logics. POLAR allows for specifying several relationships among annotations and annotated (sub)parts or fragments. Queries can be posed to extract the knowledge contained in structured annotation hypertexts. POLAR supports annotation-based retrieval, i.e. document and discussion search, by applying an augmentation strategy (knowledge augmentation, propagating propositions from subcontexts like annotations, or relevance augmentation, where retrieval status values are propagated) in conjunction with probabilistic inference, where P(d -> q), the probability that a document d implies a query q, is estimated. POLAR's semantics is based on possible worlds and accessibility relations. It is implemented on top of four-valued probabilistic Datalog. POLAR's core retrieval functionality, knowledge augmentation with probabilistic inference, is evaluated for discussion and document search. The experiments show that all relevant POLAR objects, merged annotation targets, fragments and content annotations, are able to increase retrieval effectiveness when used as a context for discussion or document search. Additional experiments reveal that we can determine the polarity of annotations with an accuracy of around 80%