Group Annotations in NCSA Mosaic

Introduction

Mosaic 1.2 supports group annotations -- annotations to documents anywhere on the network that are shared by multiple people in a group.

This capability is intended to support workgroup collaboration -- relatively small, relatively local groups of people working together on a common problem on the Internet. The idea is that such a group will run a local group annotation server (or just annotation server). Each time a member of the group accesses a document anywhere on the Internet, the annotation server is contacted to find out if any members of the group have posted annotations on that document; if so, hyperlinks to the annotations (served by the annotation server) are interleaved into the document text -- just like with personal annotations. Annotations (both text and audio) can be posted via the normal Mosaic annotation interface, by selecting "Workgroup Annotations" from the appropriate option menu.

We have developed an annotation server (which has been released as part of the NCSA httpd versions 0.4 and 0.5; see here).

Status of Annotation Systems In Mosaic

(This section is new as of 18 Sep, 1993.) Mosaic 2.0 will not initially have group annotation support. The group annotation protocol used in Mosaic 1.2 and in NCSA httpd 0.4/0.5 is being deprecated and will be replaced in later versions of Mosaic 2.x and NCSA httpd 1.x by a better, HTTP/1.0-based protocol.

The NCSA Public Annotation Server

The NCSA public annotation server is no longer supported. You can run a local group annotation server for your group if you want group annotation support, but you should not use hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8001 as your group annotation server.

Caveats

There is no security in place: anyone may edit or delete annotations that anyone else posts. This means two things for users of the current group annotation support:

Please be nice and don't interfere with other people's annotations.
Don't implicitly trust annotations that you read; author, content, or both could have been interfered with without the real author's consent or knowledge.

The current annotation server is a proof of concept. We are planning to address the larger issues involved with a practical, trustable system down the road.

Design Issues

There are a number of unresolved design issues involving group- and community-wide annotation servers. We'd love to hear your ideas. Discussion, summaries, etc. of some of these issues will be here.