Towards Annotopia—Enabling the Semantic Interoperability of Web-Based Annotations

Abstract: This paper describes the results of a collaborative effort that has reconciled the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) ontology and the Annotation Ontology (AO) to produce a merged data model [the Open Annotation (OA) data model] to describe Web-based annotations—and hence facilitate the discovery, sharing and re-use of such annotations. Using a number of case studies that include digital scholarly editing, 3D museum artifacts and sensor data streams, we evaluate the OA model’s capabilities. We also describe our implementation of an online annotation server that supports the storage, search and retrieval of OA-compliant annotations across multiple applications and disciplines. Finally we discuss outstanding problem issues associated with the OA ontology, and the impact that certain design decisions have had on the efficient storage, indexing, search and retrieval of complex structured annotations.