Making Web Annotations Persistent over Time

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method combining the Open Annotation data model and the Memento framework to ensure web annotations remain relevant over time despite changes in web resource representations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that guarantees the persistence of web annotations by linking them to archived versions of resources using temporal navigation.

Findings

Theoretical solutions for annotation reconstruction with archived resources

Proof-of-concept experiments demonstrating annotation retrieval from archived versions

Enhanced annotation relevance over time despite resource changes

Abstract

As Digital Libraries (DL) become more aligned with the web architecture, their functional components need to be fundamentally rethought in terms of URIs and HTTP. Annotation, a core scholarly activity enabled by many DL solutions, exhibits a clearly unacceptable characteristic when existing models are applied to the web: due to the representations of web resources changing over time, an annotation made about a web resource today may no longer be relevant to the representation that is served from that same resource tomorrow. We assume the existence of archived versions of resources, and combine the temporal features of the emerging Open Annotation data model with the capability offered by the Memento framework that allows seamless navigation from the URI of a resource to archived versions of that resource, and arrive at a solution that provides guarantees regarding the persistence of web annotations over time. More specifically, we provide theoretical solutions and proof-of-concept experimental evaluations for two problems: reconstructing an existing annotation so that the correct archived version is displayed for all resources involved in the annotation, and retrieving all annotations that involve a given archived version of a web resource.