I’m at a workshop on annotation at Harvard. Philip Desenne is giving one of the keynotes.

We’re here to talk about the Web 3.0, Phil says — making the Web more fully semantic.

Phil says that we need to re-write the definition of annotation. We should be talking about hyper-nota: digital media-rich annotations. Annotations are important, he says. Try to imagine social networks with the ratings, stars, comments, etc. Annotations also spawn new scholarship.

The new dew digital annotation paradigm is the gateway to Web 3.0: connecting knowledge through a common semantic language. There are many annotation tools out there. “All are very good in their own media…But none of them share a common model to interoperate.” That’s what we’re going to work on today. “The Open Annotation Framework” is the new digital paradigm. But it’s not a simple model because it’s a complex framework. Phil shows a pyramid: Create / Search / Seek patterns / Analyze / Publish / Share. [Each of these has multiple terms and ideas that I didn’t have time to type out.]

Of course we need to abide by open standards. He points to W3C, Open Source and Creative Commons. And annotations need to include multimedia notes. We need to be able to see annotations relating to one another, building networks across the globe. [Knowledge networks FTW!] Hierarchies of meaning allow for richer connections. We can analyze text and other media and connect that metadata. We can look across regional and cultural patterns. We can publish, share and collaborate. All if we have a standard framework.

For this to happeb we beed a standardized referencing system for segments or fragments of a work. We also need to be able to export them into standard formats such as XML TEI.

Lots of work has been done on this: RDF Models and Ontologies, the Open Annotiation Community Group, the Open Annotation Model. “The Open Annotation Model is the common language.”

If we don’t adopt standards for annotation we’ll have disassociated, stagnant info. We’ll dereased innovation research, teaching, and learning knowledge. This is especially an issue when one thinks about MOOCs — a course with 150,000 students creating annotations.

Connective Collective Knowledge has existed for millennia he says. As far back as Aristarchus, marginalia had ymbols to allow pointing to different scrolls in the Library of Alexandria. Where are the connected collective knowledge systems today? Who is networking the commentaries on digital works? “Shouldn’t this be the mission of the 21st century library?”

Harvard has a portal for info about annotations: annotations.harvard.edu

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