Design and Implementation of an XML-based Personal Web Annotation Tool

Abstract

When people read paper documents, they often actively work with the text by highlighting and underlining passages of the text. However, the annotation activities are not considered in the native infrastructure ofWeb electronic publishing. Though many augmented annotation systems have been proposed, they do not simultaneously address the personalization openness, and extensibility issues that are important for user-centric annotation. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a personal annotation tool called WebPAT. It adopts an open architecture in its native design by using JavaScript and XML. In addition, it is highly extensible because users can customizeWebPAT with normal editors. Furthermore, its functionalities are all user-centric and can be performed without interaction to remote servers. To date, a preliminary prototype has been implemented on the basis of Microsoft Internet Explorer. From the working experience, thoughWebPAT currently lacks some fancy drawing facilities, the prototype demonstrates its open and extensible annotation architecture.