Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to “build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web”.

As stated on the OAC’s Web site: 

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

The overarching goals of this project (consisting of multiple phases) are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

(via: DigitalKoans)

INSEMTIVES plans to collaborate with a number of projects during its lifetime. With that respect, we are currently discussing different collaboration possibilities with the European project KIWI which is set out to realize novel means to support knowledge management using Web2.0 and semantic technologies.

Last week I had the pleasure to introduce our project in the KIWI plenary meeting in Prague and in the same sense to get some insights about current work from the KIWI partners.  It was quite interesting to see their work and especially their use cases. The most interesting use case from my point of view is the Sun use case which has some interesting people and technologies in it.  One very interesting part of their use case is current work by Henry Story on FOAF+SSL and by Peter Reiser and his group on the Community Equity (CE) approach. The goal of CE is to implement a system which determines the social value of people’s contribution with respect to contributed content, skills, or participation. CE is definitely interesting with respect to our incentive research in INSEMTIVES and we will for sure monitor what is going on there.
Furthermore it was nice to see the KIWI platform in action while getting an in-depth introduction to it.

So thanks again to Sebastian for inviting me to their meeting and I am looking forward to welcome him next week in our plenary meeting in Innsbruck!

Tobias