Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of the Use of Annotations in Interactive and Collaborative DL Access

Project description In most contemporary digital library (DL) management systems the contents are conveyed to the user as a “collection of information items ” which can be searched or browsed. However, this paradigm is often not sufficient to cope with embedded usage, for which access to the contents is not seen as an isolated activity, but as part of a larger work process, where tasks like interaction with other users, extraction of knowledge, and analysis or evaluation of documents need to be integrated. Most of these scholarly activities result in new texts or multimedia objects which refer to the already existing documents as “annotations”. Up to now, annotations have been- in most cases- stored together with the documents they are related to in a central DL repository. With the advent of decentralised DL architectures in Grid or Peer-to-Peer environments, but also in Service-oriented architectures, these design choices need to be revised by solutions which allow us to manage annotations independently from a particular DL management system. Thus, the main goals of this project are: • to develop an annotation DL service and to define a set of API to allow the access to this service from different DLs. The annotation service will also provide an infrastructure for advanced annotation-based retrieval functionality; • to integrate the service into the DAFFODIL syste