In-Context Annotations

August 8th, 2011

“In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing” by Kawase et al.

Nice work to combine the usage of in-situ (or in his word in-context) annotations, with the potential of social media. See http://www.springerlink.com/content/n615325840622410/

The tool they are using is called SpreadCrumb. The previous paper explains also the usage of SpreadCrumbs, which itself is based on Diigo. See: http://www.l3s.de/web/upload/documents/1/Annotations%20and%20hypertrails%20with%20spreadcrumbs%20-%20CA%20v1.pdf

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Annotations and Linked Data

May 24th, 2011

Haslhofer and a team at AIT developed an annotation system for geographical, manly historical, maps. With their system called YUMA people are able to provide annotations on maps (http://dme.ait.ac.at/annotation/). Based on data provided by the EU funded Europeana Connect project (http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/), they are able to propose linked data based on geographical position of annotation. These linked data items help to provide further contextual information about the annotation as well as the resource.

They use linked data sources from: GeoNames, LinkedGeoData and DBpedia

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DAS Writeback: A Collaborative Annotation System

May 16th, 2011

The team around Gustavo A Salazar, is presenting an annotation system for centralized resources. GenBank and UniProt are perfect examples of the major international efforts that have been made to integrate and share biological information.  The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) provides an adequate environment to integrate genomic and proteomic information from multiple sources making this information accessible to the community.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/143

The basic ideas are closely related to the ideas of GTAT and GTAS where the content is independently managed from its annotations.  However the focus of their work is based on creation and evolution of community protein annotations.

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Geo-spatial annotations

May 10th, 2011

a nice paper of Ben Congleton, Jacqueline Cerretani, Mark W. Newman, Mark S. Ackerman analyzed the creation of geo-spatial annotations by students.

27 students explored the creation, interpretation and sharing of map annotations in specific social contexts. Annotation authors considered multiple factors when deciding how to annotate maps.Especially two factors were relevant for creators: “How is the perceived utility to the audience” and “What will the contributions reflect about themselves?”.
Consumers of annotations value the novelty of information, but must be convinced of the author’s credibility.

Full paper can be found at Springerlink (http://www.springerlink.com/content/u034n44664982587/) and on private website (http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ackerm/pub/09b54/congleton-interact-2009.final.pdf)

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Tweets with Annotations

April 18th, 2011

Twitter is about to release an API that allows to create annotations for tweets. To each tweet a user can add several parameters of a certain value.

Tweet -> (list of) annotations -> type, (list of) {"attribute":"value"}
  • a tweet can have one or more annotation
  • tweets can have more than one annotation of the same type
  • annotations of the same type are still separate annotations
  • the attribute names in a given annotation may only occur once in a given annotation (the same restrictions as a conventional hash map)

Common attributes are: title, image, url and common types for eg. webpage, place, event have been introduced.

See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/annotations_overview for a full API of Twitter annotations

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Annotations Microsoft Slate

April 11th, 2011

After being confronted of annotations on tablet devices for distance learning classes, we had a good discussion with Microsoft. Microsoft is currently developing a new tablet device -called Slate- which is (maybe) based on a regular Windows operating system. Windows has already some nice annotation functionalities for ‘documents’. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969820.aspx for further information. Such an environment could help to push annotations on learning materials to a new stage.

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Iadis Konference

March 17th, 2011

Impressions from an interesting conference in Avila (highest city of Spain).

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eSociety

March 10th, 2011

Switching rooms to the eSociety conference at total different view to online services appears than at the eLaerning conference, see http://franzwirl.at/wordpress/?p=85.

Dr. Zizi Papacharissi, Professor and Head, Department of
Communication, University of Illinois-Chicago, USA is giving her keynote and is presenting what kind of information your are publishing when your are online at several Social Network services like facebook, linked in etc. see:

Avila networkedselfesoc11keynote

Won nice outcome of her talk was that the bigger the network gets the less information is presented by some people. Because people try to show a side of them that is appropriate to the linked people. Different  networks like family, friends, professional are getting a different view of yourself.

see: http://tigger.uic.edu/~zizi/Site/Books.html and the Book “here comes everybody” by Shirky

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Mobile Attendance

March 10th, 2011

Monitoring your student attendance? Well surprisingly there are several people at the eLearning conference that like to monitor all steps students are taking at the university. Using WLAN and GPS location services. So where are we heading to? The funny fact is that most people are thinking about the techniques, but most lost the focus on the ethic problem.

Take a look at the paper of Jacek Lewandowski and Hisbel E. Arochena “MOBILE ATTENDANCE AND TIME MONITORING SYSTEM FOR M-LEARNING APPLICATIONS: DESIGN AND PILOT RESULTS (F134)”

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Annotation Tool

March 1st, 2011

I am glad to present a new developed annotation tool. The Grafical Text Annotation Tool is now available at http://annotations.wu.ac.at:8000/gtat/. It is based on the community software OpenACS and uses functionalities of XoWiki. For further informations please take a look into the help area at http://annotations.wu.ac.at:8000/annotations/.

Have fun using the GTAT Annotations tools.

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