Implementing a Secure Annotation Service

Annotation systems enable "value-adding" to digital resources by the attachment of additional data in the form of comments, explanations, references, reviews, corrections and other types of external, subjective remarks. They facilitate group discourse and capture collective intelligence by enabling communities to attach and share their views on particular data and documents accessible over the Web. Annotation systems vary greatly with regard to the types of content they annotate, the extent of collaboration and sharing they allow and the communities which they serve. However within many applications, there is a need to restrict access to the annotations to a particular group of trusted users - in order to protect intellectual property rights or personal privacy. This paper describes a secure, open source annotation system that we have developed that uses Shibboleth and XACML to identify and authenticate users and restrict their access to annotations stored on an Annotea server

A synchronous multimedia annotation system for secure collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies

Annotating Relationships between Multiple Mixed-media Digital Objects by Extending Annotea

Annotea provides an annotation protocol to support collaborative Semantic Web-based annotation of digital resources accessible through the Web. It provides a model whereby a user may attach supplementary information to a resource or part of a resource in the form of: either a simple textual comment; a hyperlink to another web page; a local file; or a semantic tag extracted from a formal ontology and controlled vocabulary. Hence, annotations can be used to attach subjective notes, comments, rankings, queries or tags to enable semantic reasoning across web resources. More recently tabbed Browsers and specific annotation tools, allow users to view several resources (e.g., images, video, audio, text, HTML, PDF) simultaneously in order to carry out side-by-side comparisons. In such scenarios, users frequently want to be able to create and annotate a link or relationship between two or more objects or between segments within those objects. For example, a user might want to create a link between a scene in an original film and the corresponding scene in a remake and attach an annotation to that link. Based on past experiences gained from implementing Annotea within different communities in order to enable knowledge capture, this paper describes and compares alternative ways in which the Annotea Schema may be extended for the purpose of annotating links between multiple resources (or segments of resources). It concludes by identifying and recommending an optimum approach which will enhance the power, flexibility and applicability of Annotea in many domains

Annotating Relationships between Multiple Mixed-media Digital Objects by Extending Annotea

Annotea provides an annotation protocol to support collaborative Semantic Web-based annotation of digital resources accessible through the Web. It provides a model whereby a user may attach supplementary information to a resource or part of a resource in the form of: either a simple textual comment; a hyperlink to another web page; a local file; or a semantic tag extracted from a formal ontology and controlled vocabulary. Hence, annotations can be used to attach subjective notes, comments, rankings, queries or tags to enable semantic reasoning across web resources. More recently tabbed Browsers and specific annotation tools, allow users to view several resources (e.g., images, video, audio, text, HTML, PDF) simultaneously in order to carry out side-by-side comparisons. In such scenarios, users frequently want to be able to create and annotate a link or relationship between two or more objects or between segments within those objects. For example, a user might want to create a link between a scene in an original film and the corresponding scene in a remake and attach an annotation to that link. Based on past experiences gained from implementing Annotea within different communities in order to enable knowledge capture, this paper describes and compares alternative ways in which the Annotea Schema may be extended for the purpose of annotating links between multiple resources (or segments of resources). It concludes by identifying and recommending an optimum approach which will enhance the power, flexibility and applicability of Annotea in many domains