Robert Sanderson
Scientist
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Researcher
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Tim Cole
Assistant Engineering Librarian for Information Services
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) has published the final version of its Phase 1 data model guidelines, promoting an interoperable annotation environment for scholarly artifacts and online resources. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAC is the joint effort of five institutions towards unlocking annotations on scholarly collections through applying the principles of the Web architecture and concepts from the Linked Data effort. It is believed that the lack of interoperable tools and best-practices for the annotation of digital content is a critical stumbling block that must be overcome.
This presentation will focus on the most recent data model published by OAC and the differences from the version presented previously at CNI meetings. Improvements have been made in the model in response to valued feedback from the community and to better harmonize with outcomes of other initiatives, such as the Annotation Ontology modeling work that was also released this year. Further use cases have been identified and this has furthered thinking about the requirements for the data model. The goal remains a model for annotation interoperability that is rich enough to support a broad range of scholarly needs, while still being flexible enough and easy enough to adopt and use for even simple annotation scenarios.
This session will also include a report on the expected future efforts of OAC in 2011. If successful in obtaining further funding, the data model will continue to be refined based on experimental results from a range of additional international partners, including Stanford University, AustLit, Alexander Street Press, and Herzog August Bibliothek. Four further experiments will be funded, and a Using OAC Workshop will be held in spring.
Handout (PDF)
