The mission of the Web Annotation Working Group, part of the Digital Publishing Activity, is to define a generic data model for Annotations, and define the basic infrastructural elements to make it deployable in browsers and reading systems through suitable user interfaces.
Annotating, which is the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information, is a widespread activity online in many guises but currently lacks a structured approach. Web citizens make comments about online resources using either tools built into the hosting web site, external web services, or the functionality of an annotation client. Readers of ebooks make use the tools provided by reading systems to add and share their thoughts or highlight portions of texts. Comments about photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, audio tracks on SoundCloud, people’s posts on Facebook, or mentions of resources on Twitter could all be considered to be annotations associated with the resource being discussed.
The possibility of annotation is essential for many application areas. For example, it is standard practice for students to mark up their printed textbooks when familiarizing themselves with new materials; the ability to do the same with electronic materials (e.g., books, journal articles, or infographics) is crucial for the advancement of e-learning. Submissions of manuscripts for publication by trade publishers or scientific journals undergo review cycles involving authors and editors or peer reviewers; although the end result of this publishing process usually involves Web formats (HTML, XML, etc.), the lack of proper annotation facilities for the Web platform makes this process unnecessarily complex and time consuming. Communities developing specifications jointly, and published, eventually, on the Web, need to annotate the documents they produce to improve the efficiency of their communication.
There is a large number of closed and proprietary web-based “sticky note” and annotation systems offering annotation facilities on the Web or as part of ebook reading systems. A common complaint about these is that the user-created annotations cannot be shared, reused in another environment, archived, and so on, due to a proprietary nature of the environments where they were created. Security and privacy are also issues where annotation systems should meet user expectations.
Additionally, there are the related topics of comments and footnotes, which do not yet have standardized solutions, and which might benefit from some of the groundwork on annotations.
The goal of this Working Group is to provide an open approach for annotation, making it possible for browsers, reading systems, JavaScript libraries, and other tools, to develop an annotation ecosystem where users have access to their annotations from various environments, can share those annotations, can archive them, and use them how they wish.
In order to address these needs, this working group will work on deliverables chiefly focused in the following approaches:
This work will take the form of several specifications as Recommendation Track documents, each of which will have considerations of security, privacy, accessibility, and internationalization implications for implementers, Web authors, and end users. Each specification must contain a section detailing any such known issues, and the Web Annotations WG will actively seek an open review for each Recommendation-track deliverable. Where possible, this working group will collaborate with other working groups to fulfill the goals of these deliverables.
The Abstract Data Model and the Vocabulary will start from the Open Annotation Data Model, developed by the W3C Open Annotation Community Group. The data model should provide a means to express provenance chains and license claims.
As many annotations will be viewed (and even stored) in HTML, one of the serializations of the data model may be in HTML (decorated with Microdata or RDFa), and another might be in a format suitable for embedding as metadata into media.
The Client-side API may consist of DOM events and a possible script interface.
The Robust Link Anchoring may define an algorithm, may be expressible as components of a URL or as a set of parameters on a hyperlink element, and may have CSS property considerations for styling the selection through a pseudo-element. The anchoring extension mechanism should address use cases such as maps and different data formats.
Robust Link Anchoring will be developed as a joint deliverable with the WebApps Working Group.
Each of the other work items may be loosely broken down into informal Task Forces, with their own mailing list to help focus discussions and address distinct communities.
In order to advance to Proposed Recommendation, each specification is expected to have at least two independent implementations of each feature defined in the specification, with comprehensive test suites and implementation reports for each specification.
Some deliverables assume native implementation in browsers, but because there are many different aspects of the overall ecosystem which are possible through incremental improvements, success of the work is not expected to depend on native implementations existing immediately.
This working group will not produce Recommendation track documents on the user interface aspects of annotation management. Note that the Group may decide to publish user interface guidelines.
The titles of the documents may change. Also, some of the main deliverables may be split into separate documents, or merged into one document, based on the possible resolution of the Working Group.
In addition to normative specifications, the Web Annotations Working Group may publish use-case and requirements and best-practice documents.
| Note: The group will document significant changes from this initial schedule on the group home page. | ||||||
| Specification | FPWD | LC | CR | PR | Rec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annotation Abstract Data Model | December 2014 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
| Vocabulary for the Annotation Abstract Data Model. | December 2014 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
| Serializations of the Annotation Abstract Data Model. | December 2014 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
| HTTP API for Annotations | February 2015 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
| Client-Side API for Annotations | February 2015 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
| Robust Link Anchoring | March 2015 | December 2015 | February 2016 | May 2016 | July 2016 | |
Note that if the new process document comes into effect, i.e., the LC and CR phases merge, then the February 2015 dates remain in effect for the new milestones.
The Web Annotation Working Group expects to follow these W3C Recommendations:
This group primarily conducts its work on the public mailing lists, and through annotations on the specifications.
public-annotation@w3.org (public
archives)public-anchoring@w3.org
(public
archives)Other topic-specific mailing lists may be added as needed. Administrative tasks may be conducted in Member-only communications.
Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the Web Annotations Working Group home page
The role of dependencies and liaisons with various external groups is fundamental to the success of this Interest Group; the group will therefore set up active liaisons early in the process to ensure that the use cases and requirements are provided to other groups in a timely manner.
This charter for the Web Annotation Working Group has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.
$Date: 2014-07-15 16:22:49 $