A collaborative scholarly annotation system for dynamic web documents: a literary case study

This paper describes ongoing work within the Aus-e-Lit project at the University of Queensland to provide collaborative annotation tools for Australian Literary Scholars. It describes our implementation of an annotation framework to facilitate collaboration and sharing of annotations within research sub-communities. Using the annotation system, scholars can collaboratively select web resources and attach different types of annotations (comments, notes, queries, tags and metadata), which can be harvested to enrich the AustLit collection. We describe how rich semantic descriptions can be added to the constantly changing AustLit collection through a set of interoperable annotation tools based on the Open Annotations Collaboration (OAC) model. RDFa enables scholars to semantically annotate dynamic web pages and contribute typed metadata about the IFLA FRBR entities represented within the AustLit collection. We also describe how the OAC model can be used in combination with OAI-ORE to produce scholarly digital editions, and compare this approach with existing scholarly annotation approaches.