A.nnotate blog

Just back from Edinburgh Repository Fringe - a gathering of people interested in making research data and publications more useful and easy to access. There were great keynote talks from Dorothea Salo ['the institutional repository is dead'] and David De Roure ['how repositories can avoid failing like the grid'], and lots of ‘performances’ in the spirit of an unconference / BarCamp event.

A common theme seemed to be that setting up a university-wide database and expecting researchers to populate it by filling out forms just doesn’t work; but providing easy to use web services for collaboration and improving visibility / citation counts of research is the way to go.

We’ve been thinking along these lines too - our A.nnotate.com service can be used to enhance existing document repositories with private / shared annotation features (using the A.nnotate APIs). As well as A.nnotate, we also run the PublicationsList.org service which makes it easy for researchers to maintain their list of publications on the web - and can be used as a front end service to institutional archives to make repository deposit as automated as possible.

Some of the interesting ideas from the meeting (see the repofringe08 wiki for the full programme):

• Ways for sharing/presenting research data - including Stuart Macdonald’s DISC-UK DataShare project with interactive widgets, Simon Coles experiments with trackbacks / pings / ratings / comments for research data in chemistry, David De Roure’s MyExperiment facebook-like social networking site for bioinformatics data which looks like it has great potential beyond its current emphasis on sharing glorified makefiles graphical workflows
• The dangers of ‘Bit Rot’ [talk by Richard Wright, BBC archives] - should you archive the uncompressed version of files (e.g. TIFF rather than JPG?) given that all digital formats (tape / disk) degrade over time, and a few bits lost from a compressed file can render it useless, but uncompressed formats degrade much more gracefully. My immediate instinct would be to compress and store multiple copies for redundancy / error checking … but for the longer term (10s / 100s of years) the uncompressed version is preferable.

Spotted in Edinburgh on the way to the meeting:-

We’ve just announced a bargain flat-fee server deal for educational use: $1995 per server to use how you want. There are no limits on the number of users or volume of documents allowed. That just depends on the hardware you put it on. In return, we’d like your feedback to help improve the system.

A significant fraction of our inquiries come from colleges and universities that see applications for A.nnotate among their staff and students. Naturally, teachers can use it to provide feedback on student assignments instead of writing on printed copies. But there have been a range of other creative suggestions too. Staff could prepare a folder of annotated websites with comments or questions in particular places, or students could be asked to annotate a particular text.

Some of these fit easily with the present configuration, but others could do with some extensions. For example, to get twenty students separately annotating the same document, you need to make twenty separate copies at present. Most of all though, the current model is based on users who have accounts and can upload documents, and guest annotators who provide feedback on those documents. In a classroom environment though you could sometimes want just one user and 20 annotators, but at other times maybe everyone should be a user. Do you need a single user license or a 20-user one?

We do not want to limit the ways teachers can use A.nnotate, and everyone knows that complicated per-seat pricing models are a real turn-off. Hence the flat-fee deal. You buy the server license outright and do what you like with it. You can probably get a thousand students on one server as long as they don’t all try to upload assignments in the same half hour before a deadline. All we ask is that you let us know from time to time how you’re using it so that we can share the ideas with others, and to let us know if you have any suggestions for new developments.

Happy a.nnotating!