The BAsAS Architecture For Semantic Web Annotations

A poster I presented at the 1st Semantic Web Authoring and Annotations Workshop at the ISWC 2006. 

We describe a generic architecture for the (semi-automatic) creation, storage and querying for annotations of web resources. Our BAsAS architecture uses recent advances from the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 communities to make Semantic Web annotations a reality. The BAsAS architecture makes it easy for users to start to annotate and easy for
developer to use the annotations that get created.

Besides describing the general architecture we will also detail an implementation of this architecture build for a Semantic Web community portal.

Think of it as Annotea but better. The presented system addresses some of the most important shortcomings of Annotea: that there are only plugins for the firefox browser (shutting out the majority of web users) and that there is no query language for annotations.

Actually I'm still quite annoyed that it only got accepted as poster. It was not "innovative enough", the changes to Annotea not big enough. Ahh well, I put it down to my bad writing. In a way I even agree that we don't need another Semantic Annotation Paper  - we need applications that come with a nice user interface and are usable "out of the box" (in particular without the need for the user to worry about finding a server - something you've to do with current Annotea tools).

The long version of the paper is here.