Authors
Ron Chernich, Stephen Crawley, and Jane Hunter (University of Queensland)
Abstract
Although Web publishing has become ubiquitous in modern research as a means of presenting and sharing information, to date this media has been essentially one-way. To address this limitation, numerous systems have proposed and demonstrated mechanisms by which readers can share mark-up of on-line documents. Although studies have demonstrated the value to collaboration of shared annotations on Web resources, there is still no wide-spread, universally-accepted, standardized approach to annotation services. Moreover there are a number of distinct, intrinsic limitations within the World Wide Web’s underlying technologies that prevent the wide scale implementation of interoperable, shared annotations.
This presentation will examine these limitations and show how our Danno research project has managed to overcome many of the inherent technological barriers to wide-spread Web site annotation.
About the speaker
Ron is a Principal Research Fellow working in the field of metadata management and annotation services for the eResearch Lab within the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) at the University of Queensland. Ron has over 30 years of experience in IT working in Australia and overseas in commercial software development. On returning to Australia from the USA in 1998, Ron joined the Co-operative Research Centre for Distributed Systems (DSTC) at the University of Queensland as the Director of Engineering. He remained with them until the Centre closed in June 2006, driving the development of commercial software products from DSTC research outcomes.
These included dCON, a Java implementation of the Object Management Group (OMG) cosNotification specification for asynchronous messaging, and MetaSuite, a complete solution for schema independent metadata incorporating editing, validation, searching, and retrieval. Both systems attracted government, academic, and commercial users. Currently, Ron is leading the development of a metadata annotation service for mutli-media digital collections that will become part of the Atlas of Living Australia.