Rowe, M. (2007)  Meervisage - A Community Based Annotation Tool. ‘Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0’ Conference at the University of York 5-6th September, 2007.

How SW can benefit from incorporation with existing 'Social Web'.

"...collaborative generation of metadata... using social networks as a user base..."

Uses fb groups created for sharing and organisation of research.  Suggests posting links to useful resources is comparable to annotating the resource.  Comments are more metadata.

Points out usual stuff of actually generating semantic data being a problem for SW.

System requirements:

• Annotations must be shared in a community.
• Annotations can be reviewed and edited (/audited) (by group)
• Collaborative
• Central repo.
• Annotations contain semantic metadata.
• Content of resource annotated, not URL.
• Communication layer that doesn't interrupt annotation (uses external services).

Review of existing systems:

• Annotea [9] [13]
• J. Kahan, M.R. Koivunen, E. Prud Hommeaux, R.R. Swick. Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Web annotations. Computer Networks. 2002.
• M Koivunen. Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Collaboration. Proc. Of 
• the ESWC2005 Conference, 2005.
• No communication layer (but has discussion threads, wat?). 
• Can only be edited  by author, but can be reviewed by others.
• Can be local, private or shared.  RDF.
• Piggy Bank [10]
• D Huynh, S Mazzocchi, D Karger. Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web Inside Your Web Browser. Springer-Verlag GmbH. 2005. 
• RDF. 
• Auto and manual.  Bundled with scrapers; if they fail, manual.  Only of one type.
• Share group or global, or save to local 'semantic bank' <-- find="" is="" out="" this="" what="">
• Reviewed by all, edited by author.
• Community of users, but no SNS integration.
• KIM [14]
• A Kiryakov, B Popov, D Ognyanoff, D Manov, A Kirilov, M Goranov. Semantic Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval. Journal of Web Semantics, Springer. 2004.
• Automatic named entity recognition.  
• Links to knowledgebase with ontology.
• Creates new URIs for new entities or link swith entities it already knows about.
• Global sharing.
• Can be deleted but not edited.
• No social involvement.
• Magpie [11]
• J Domingue, M Dzbor and E Motta. Semantic Layering with Magpie. Handbook on Ontologies. 2004.
• Auto annotate webpage.
• Similar to KIM, but does not hyperlink to knowledgebase; instead each item gets context menu (right click) with services depending on entity.
• 'Multi-dimensional approach'. Uses ontology to trigger other services depending on concept.
• Plugin for IE.  
• Simply looks for entities that are in ontology (Dzbor 2004).

[1] Using existing information to derive semantics from folksonomies (delicious):
X Wu, L Zhang, Y Yu. Exploring social annotations for the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on the World Wide Web, 2006.

[15] Social bookmarking tools and how semantic info aids resource discovery.  Probabalistic model of how resources are annotated:

A Plangprasopchok, K Lerman. Exploiting Social Annotation for Automatic Resource Discovery. Eprint arXiv, 2007.

[16] Distributed nature of folksonomies.  Improve search mechanisms.  Tags not great:

S Choy, A. Lui. Web Information Retrieval in Collaborative Tagging Systems. Proceedings of International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2006.

        (vs.)

[17] Rigid taxonomies not great:

C Shirky. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet, 2005.

[18] Methodology for easier browsing of large scale social annotations:

Z Xu, Y Fu, J Mao, D Su. Towards the semantic web: Collaborative tag suggestions. Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006, 2006.

All use one annotation per resource, not annotation of content within, so only one lot of metadata about a page.

Meervisage

"To aid the process of collaborative annotation of web documents"

Allows sharing of annotations between subset of SNS users (eg. fb group).

Management of users and groups offloaded to third party.

Stored in central annotation store.

Annotations contain author, SNS, folksonomies and date.  Made from content within.

Meerkat is "responsible for generating semantic metadata by annotating external web resources."  Meervisage for management via social network.

Meerkat allows a user to edit another user's annotations if they are members of the same group on facebook.

Popularity rating of resources rises with fb discussion.

Meerkat informs browser users if they come across a resource that has been heavily discussed on fb, and by which group etc.

Meervisage also provides RSS feed.

Evaluate by comparing precision and recall metrics of annotations by one user in an allotted time, and those by a group.

-> Don't know how this helps to assess quality of annotations; maybe I'm dumb?  Find out.

Limited to private, says it's like that's a good think :s

Oh, because public access would be "laborious and resource intensive".

Annotations rated on usefulness and weighted.

[20] Attempt to describe folksonomies as part of formal ontology.  Meervisage doesn't; limited to users' viewpoint:

S Angeletou, M Sabou, L Specia, E Motta. Bridging the Gap Between Folksonomies and the Semantic Web: An Experience Report. Workshop: Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, European Semantic Web Conference, 2007.

[9] + [13] are most similar.  Have groups, but groups aren't already established networks.

Future work

Annotating multimedia.

Matching assigned tags with ontology terms mined from Web.

[19] Desktop app for annotating text with ontology:

A Chakravarthy, F Ciravegna, V Lanfranchi. AKTiveMedia: Cross-media Document Annotation and Enrichment. Poster Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Semantic Web Conference, 2006.