Upcoming Workshop on Web Annotations: Footnotes, comments, bookmarks, and marginalia on the Web

W3C announced today a workshop on digital annotations for the Web, part of our ongoing effort on enhancing the Web experience.

Annotating is the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information. Annotation is a ubiquitous activity online in many guises: comments on articles, footnotes, sticky notes, “hot spots” on images, timestamped notes on video or audio tracks, highlighted text passages in ebook readers, evocative pictures attached to song lyrics, quotes and links on social media, and even tagged bookmarks, are all forms of annotation. One of the most common and engaging Web activities for the average person is discussion of a document or piece of media.

Many projects and companies are now turning to annotations to solve a variety of issues with communication on the Web, and is of particular interest to the education, research, and digital publishing industries. To address these needs, W3C's Web Annotations workshop will focus on identifying standardization priorities for chartering a potential Web Annotations Working Group, on such topics as:

• Robust anchoring to dynamic third-party documents
• Styling selections and annotations
• Data models
• Federation and syndication
• Web storage and management of annotations
• Client side APIs and methods for the implementation of annotation systems
• Practical experience with annotation systems
• Annotation of data

W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all, but all participants are required to submit a position paper or statement of interest by 28 February 2014.