(2018-03-21) Udell How Web Annotation Will Transform Content Management

Jon Udell: How web annotation will transform content management. In February the W3C approved recommendations to enable annotation on the web

Users of such tools will be happy to know that annotations can now be represented, stored, and exchanged by interoperable clients and servers

the broader significance of this new standard is that, by defining how applications refer to selections within content, it increases the granularity of the web’s address space in ways that benefit many existing applications and will enable new ones.

The W3C calls these selections segments of interest and defines how to find them within content

The act of annotation forms an address that locates a selectable segment within a resource, turning it into a new kind of web resource.

let’s make it concrete by exploring a key use case: enterprise content management (ECM).

example. GovCMS, hosted on Acquia’s cloud, is a platform that “combines Drupal Core and selected modules to enable the quick creation of Australian government websites.” Within the GovCMS community, capabilities and assets built for one website can be shared by all.

Here’s a fact published at https://pancreatic-cancer.canceraustralia.gov.au/statistics: an estimated 3,271 new cases of pancreatic cancers were diagnosed in Australia in 2017.

Using annotation, I can create an address for that statement and a link that points to it

But the statement annotated in that document is not the authoritative source for the fact.

Modern ECM systems encourage the use of modular content blocks, a strategy that makes sense for coarse-grained assets. But to handle paragraphs, sentences, or phrases that way would require authors to anticipate myriad possibilities for reuse, and to invest much effort in preparing for such reuse. In an annotation-powered ECM system, every paragraph, sentence, or phrase is a potentially reusable fine-grained asset

single source of truth that, when surfaced in other contexts, can be transcluded rather than copied. (transclusion)