Did you ever read something on a book, felt the need to comment, took up
a pencil and scribbled something on the books' text'? If you did, you
just annotated a book. But that process has now become something
fundamental and revolutionary in these days of computing. Annotation is
all about adding further information to text, pictures, movies and even
to physical objects. In practice, anything which can be identified
either virtually or physically can be annotated.
In this book, we will delve into what makes annotations, and analyse
their significance for the future evolutions of the web. We will explain
why it was thought to be unreasonable to annotate documents manually and
how Web 2.0 is making us rethink our beliefs. We will have a look at
tools which make use of Artificial Intelligence techniques to support
people in the annotation task. Behind these tools, there exists an
important property of the web known as redundancy; we will explain what
it is and show how it can be exploited. Finally we will gaze into the
crystal ball and see what we might expect to see in the future.
Until people understand what the web is all about and its grounding in
annotation, people cannot start appreciating it. And until they do so,
they cannot start creating the web of the future.