Annotation: textual media for cooperation
Abstract
This paper aims at describing an annotating model used to underlie a collaborative annotation tool development.
Annotating becomes more and more important, as digital documents become central in work situations. Supports
for deliberation and arguing around these documents are needed. In this article, we propose a definition of
annotation merging Semantic Web view of annotation (tagging) and Social Web view of annotation (comments).
We are also presenting existing annotation tools classified according to the Computational/Cognitive dichotomy
of annotation definition that we propose, and conclude on the need to develop an annotation tool merging the
social annotation to enable discourse about a document in a distributed environment and to support it by way of
indexing (computational annotation). Our design process for this annotation tool consists in starting from an
annotating model inspired from humanities theories. After a review of main models fitting to our purpose, we
conclude by deploring the lack of interaction representation in cognitive models of comprehension or text
creation, and the low focus on the annotating production. We then propose a model inspired from the medieval
rhetorical discourse production. We finally detail its ongoing implementation and discuss how it fits basic
features of cooperative annotating.