Timothy Cole
Mathematics Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Earlier this year the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published three new W3C recommendations (standards) on web annotation. The standards are designed to foster an ecosystem of interoperable annotation tools and services, making it easier to comment on, describe, or tag any web resource. Many use cases addressed by these recommendations were driven by publisher needs and requests, and 2017 also saw the merger of the W3C and the International Digital Publishing Forum (the group responsible for the EPUB3 standard) and the subsequent chartering of the W3C Publishing Working Group. This Group has begun work on a new web publications standard and will begin work in 2018 on EPUB4 and more. Collectively these efforts have spawned a new Apache incubator project (Apache Annotator) and are helping publishers of all stripes take greater advantage of the W3C’s Open Web Platform while simultaneously ensuring that the Platform supports publisher needs. This presentation will provide an overview of the W3C Web Annotation Recommendations and associated Working Group notes, it will include an update on the Apache Annotator incubator work, and it will discuss progress on the Web Publications draft standard. For additional background and context, see the 2014 CNI briefing announcing the formation of the W3C Web Annotation Working Group.
https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/making-it-easier-to-share-annotations-on-the-web/
https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/AnnotatorProposal
https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator
https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/publ-wg/
https://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
https://www.cni.org/topics/scholarly-communication/towards-an-open-annotation-standard-2