Multivalent Annotations

Paper is still preferred to digital document systems for tasks involving annotating, folding, juxtaposing, or otherwise treating the document as a tactile object. Based on the Multivalent Documents model, Multivalent annotations bring to digital documents of potentially any source format, from PostScript to SGML, an open ended variety of user-extensible, sharable manipulations. Several very different forms of distributed annotation based on this model have been implemented. The Multivalent framework composes together annotations of any type, which can result in novel, useful combinations. 1. Introduction Digital documents are superior in many ways to their paper counterparts. They are easier to edit, reproduce, distribute, and search than paper documents. While these advantages have led to the dominance of the digital format for document preparation, paper still provides much functionality that is simply unavailable via the digital medium. An important class of capabilities that explo..