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.