Web3 Annotation Model
In traditional print media, it's common practice among readers to underline text, highlight sections or write comments in the margins. Such annotations allow readers to express their opinions. Annotations in the World Wide Web is a standard for creating similar annotations on the web for digital content. Those annotations are typically used to convey information about a resource or associations between resources. Simple examples include a comment or tag on a single web page or image, or a blog post about a news article.
The Web Annotation Model specification describes a structured model and format to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. With a web annotation system, a user can add, modify or remove information from a Web resource without modifying the resource itself. The annotations can be thought of as a layer on top of the existing resource, and this annotation layer is usually visible to other users who share the same annotation system. It's standardized by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group.
Web annotation can be used for the following purposes:
- to rate a Web resource, such as by its usefulness, user-friendliness, suitability for viewing by minors.
- to improve or adapt its contents by adding/removing material.
- as a collaborative tool, e.g. to discuss the contents of a certain resource.
- as a medium of artistic or social criticism, by allowing Web users to reinterpret, enrich or protest against institution or ideas that appear on the Web.
- to quantify transient relationships between information fragments.
- to save, retain and synthesize selected information.
The basic data structures of Web Annotation are
- target (the element being annotated, e.g., a web document or a part of it),
- body (the content of the annotation, e.g., a string value), and
- annotation (the element that serves to relate body and target of an annotation)
