The open annotation collaboration: A data model to support sharing and interoperability of scholarly annotations

This paper presents the outcomes to date of the annotation interoperability component of the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Project.1 The OAC project is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, the University of Queensland, Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, the George Mason University and the University of Maryland. OAC has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a data model and framework to enable the sharing and interoperability of scholarly annotations across annotation clients, collections, media types, applications and architectures. The OAC approach is based on the assumption that clients publish annotations on the Web and that the target, content and the annotation itself are all URI-addressable Web resources. By basing the OAC model on Semantic Web and Linked Data practices, we hope to provide the optimum approach for the publishing, sharing and interoperability of annotations and annotation applications. In this paper, we describe the principles and components of the OAC data model, together with a number of scholarly use cases that demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the model in different scenarios