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Annotation |
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Some commentary on annotation:
The annotation approach to commenting as demonstrated by stet or co-ment provides a significant improvement in the utility of generic comment-field based feedback systems. This approach should be decoupled from serving as the central function of an app and made available as more of a plugin or even as a service (like the disqus comment service) so that it can be used as the commenting system for any content that deserves collaborative editing without being a live open wiki (Ian has insight on this for building Commentary, but already Diigo does this pretty well). Legal documents such as legislation on Publicmarkup.org is a good example, but in many cases any wiki talk page, like mediawiki's discussion pages, could be vastly improved if they were overhauled with a system that allowed the discussion to occur directly in the context of disputed content.
Improving the discussion page system for wikis could provide for a more sane and easily manageable model of collaborative editing. Instead of having the page always open to edits, you leave it closed but open for annotations, then when the annotations have significantly built up you temporarily open the page for edits. This allows you to develop more meaningfully differentiated versions and to peg the annotations to specific revisions.
(January 2010 update) It looks like this might be possible by combining the ShiftSpace highlighter with MediaWiki LiquidThreads
- Hypothes.is - open platform for critiques and peer-review on the web
- Substance - open source document collaboration with annotation
- AnnotateIT - (Javascript library and Python + Couchdb backend)
- Digress it - Annotation as a wordpress plugin
- PublicMarkup - section by section feedback for policy docs. (Source Code)
- Shiftpress - ShiftSpace as a wordpress plugin
- co-ment - python on django, open source, mature and in development
- Commentary - python, ian's stab at this
- Marginalia - php (though i think there's a python port), open source
- stet - perl, open source, unmaintained
- Diigo - web service for online research, social bookmarking with annotation
- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-and-learn-from-others-as-you.html
- http://www.shiftspace.org/
Here's a review of several more annotation as-a-service apps and the wikipedia page on the subject
See the Quora discussion: What are some good open source collaborative annotation tools?