Use Cases/Filtering of annotations

Use Case: As a reader, I want to be able to limit by source what annotations are visible so that I am not overwhelmed by too many annotations that are not currently relevant to me.

A user may be reading a web page with a normal set of annotations for the page but find that there are too many annotations included in the set for her immediate purposes, and therefore may want to have the system limit which annotations are presented based on the author of the annotation. The limitation may be positive (only notes by Author1 or Author2), or may be negative (all notes except those by Author3 or Author4). If the set of annotations is so large as to have noticeable performance impact for retrieval or filtering, the users limitation requirement should be able to improve the performance by limiting how much of the annotation set needs to be retrieved and processed by the system.

Examples

1. Professor Grumblegore, while expounding on chloroplasts, mentions to Henry that Serpiente's paper on the evolution of plastids does not apply to chloroplasts, as he had described in an annotation on the paper. Henry later consults the annotated paper but finds that there are over 1200 annotations, a number of which discuss chloroplasts, and that Grumblegore has made many annotations of his own on a variety of aspects of the paper. By limiting the systems presentation to only those notes by Grumblegore, Henry is able to pick out the relevant annotation and after several readings comes to appreciate Grumblegore's brilliance even more.
2. Alice visits the web page for The Troubadours and wants to see what others have noted about them in the annotations. Unfortunately, she finds that a fanatic fan going by the name Troublemore has added annotations giving obscure minutia for almost every sentence of the web page. By having the system suppress showing of Troublemore's annotations, she gains the insight she was seeking.
3. Rex wants to find what his helper Quincy has noted on the web page he is supposed to study. Rex has some perceptual difficulties and the helper's markups help him find the right passages on the page and understand them. Unfortunately there are one or two dozen other annotations on the page by others, and so finding Quincy's annotations is not easy for Rex. By having the system restrict presentation to notes by Quincy alone, only Quincy's highlights show up on the page and Rex can find and read them.