[sugar] Annotation (was Re: Viewing PDFs from Browse)
Mikus Grinbergs
mikus at bga.com
Tue Oct 14 14:01:44 EDT 2008
Disclaimer: the following is a somewhat off-topic metacomment:
> ... I do not know what you mean by 'works best'. Most remote
> annotation occurs offline and is never aggregated, but works just fine
> for the production of notes for one's personal journal. We would be
> better off if there were a ready way for noters to smoothly aggregate
> and share such notes, but smooth doesn't mean instantaneous; it would
> be enough for annotations to aggregate smoothly with an asynchronous
> network with effective latencies in months.
This is a beautiful idea -- but I do not know how achievable.
My own method of learning a not-too-big topic (e.g., "what all needs
to be put into a subdirectory of /home/olpc/Activities/ ?") is to
make up a 'Cheat Sheet' that lists (and tersely describes) all the
pertinent elements. [This definitely is "remote annotation".]
But when it comes to "aggregating" what I've done, the best that I
can think of would be to send out a copy of my 'Cheat Sheet' to
someone trying to figure out the same topic. Then if the recipient
can decipher my style and remarks, "sharing" will have occurred.
[It would do me no good to send my 'Cheat Sheet' to the original
author - what I've made up is an 'extract', not an 'addendum'.]
An example of a means to "fill in" information is XML. Maybe we
should wish for a genius to make up an XML 'Annotation Template' --
which though independently filled in by multiple commentators about
a given Work, could then be "merged smoothly" to produce either a
stand-alone adjunct to the original Work, or actually be aggregated
with the original Work to produce a new version of that Work.
mikus
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