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Annotating All Knowledge

hypothes.is: “A coalition of some of the world’s key scholarly publishers, platforms, libraries, and technology organizations are coming together to create an open, interoperable annotation layer over their content.

For decades web pioneers have imagined a native and universal collaborative capability over the Web. Many projects have experimented with it, yet in 2015 we’re still stuck with the same patchwork of proprietary commenting systems, only available in some places.

In the last few years a small community has been working to change that. Their goal is to standardize “annotation” as a unit of conversation built into the very fabric of the Web. In late 2014 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body for the Web, established a formal Working Group to support this standards effort. Much progress has been made, and many implementations are now mature enough to be deployed…..Scholars are natural annotators, as the process of creating new knowledge requires building on what’s come before. So, in order to bring this capability to the areas where new knowledge is created and published, we sought out some of the world’s most essential scholarly publishers and knowledge platforms. They realize that a robust and interoperable conversation layer can transform scholarship, enabling personal note taking, peer review, copy editing, post publication discussion, journal clubs, classroom uses, automated classification, deep linking, and much more. They understand that this layer must evolve as an open, interoperable, and shared capability aligned with the motivations and interests of scholars and researchers. They are agreeing to collaborate openly with their peers, to share experiences, and to work together towards mutual objectives….Read the article on Nature.com about the coalition…(More)”