Making web annotations persistent over time

Journal Article · Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1816123.1816125· OSTI ID:1000933

Sanderson, Robert ^[1]; Van De Sompel, Herbert ^[1]

---

1. Los Alamos National Laboratory

As Digital Libraries (DL) become more aligned with the web architecture, their functional components need to be fundamentally rethought in terms of URIs and HTTP. Annotation, a core scholarly activity enabled by many DL solutions, exhibits a clearly unacceptable characteristic when existing models are applied to the web: due to the representations of web resources changing over time, an annotation made about a web resource today may no longer be relevant to the representation that is served from that same resource tomorrow. We assume the existence of archived versions of resources, and combine the temporal features of the emerging Open Annotation data model with the capability offered by the Memento framework that allows seamless navigation from the URI of a resource to archived versions of that resource, and arrive at a solution that provides guarantees regarding the persistence of web annotations over time. More specifically, we provide theoretical solutions and proof-of-concept experimental evaluations for two problems: reconstructing an existing annotation so that the correct archived version is displayed for all resources involved in the annotation, and retrieving all annotations that involve a given archived version of a web resource.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-06NA25396
• OSTI ID: 1000933
• Report Number(s): LA-UR-10-01908; LA-UR-10-1908; TRN: US201101%%712
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
ARCHITECTURE
FUNCTIONALS
NAVIGATION