Digital Annotation of Printed Documents

Digital annotation systems are usually based on partial scenarios and arbitrary requirements. Accidental and essential characteristics are usually mixed in non explicit models. Documents and annotations are linked together accidentally according to the current technology, allowing for the development of disposable prototypes, but not to the support of non-functional requirements such as extensibility, robustness and interactivity. In this paper we perform a careful analysis on the concept of annotation, studying the scenarios supported by digital annotation tools. We also derived essential requirements based on a classification of annotation systems applied to existing tools. The analysis performed and the proposed classification can be applied and extended to other type of collaborative systems.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2009

Annotation plays a major role in a user's reading of a document: from elementary school students making notes on text books to professors marking up their latest research papers. A common place for annotations to appear is in the margin of a document. Surprisingly, there is little systematic knowledge of how, why and when annotations are written in margins or over the main text. This paper investigates how margin size impacts the ease with which documents can be annotated, and user annotation behavior. The research comprises of a two part investigation: first, a paper study that examines margins and their use in physical documents; secondly, we evaluate document reader software that supports an extended margin for annotation in digital documents.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

The Notable annotation system enables users to annotate paper documents using handheld devices in a mobile environment. This paper describes the design issues and solutions that arose in creating Notable, with a particular focus on design challenges at the intersection of annotations and handheld technology. Novel design strategies include separating the annotation writing platform from the document viewing platform, providing search as the method for document selection, offering context-sensitive phrase completion and icon-based graphical pinning for fine-granularity annotation anchoring, and including some support for coordinating group annotation activity.

2009

Institution: Duke University Project Director: Matt Cohen Award Amount: $29,857 To support: Building a prototype digital interface for static, mixed-media texts, such as documents containing handwritten annotations on printed text or on images. Project Website: http://asmodeus.ws/cohenlab/annotations.htm

2006

We examine some research issues in pattern recognition and image processing that have been spurred by the needs of digital libraries. Broader-and not only linguistic-context must be introduced in character recognition on low-contrast, tightly-set documents because the conversion of documents to coded (searchable) form is lagging far behind conversion to image formats. At the same time, the prevalence of imaged documents over coded documents gives rise to interesting research problems in interactive annotation of document images. At the level of circulation, reformatting document images to accommodate diverse user needs remains a challenge.

… of the second ACM international conference on Digital …, 1997

Readers annotate paper books as a routine part of their engagement with the materials; it is a useful practice. manifested through a wide variety of markings made in service of very different purposes. This paper examines the practice of annotation in a particular situation: the markings students make in university-level textbooks. The study focuses on the form and function of these annotations, and their status within a community of fellow textbook readers. Using this study as a basis, I discuss issues and implications for the design of annotation tools for a digital library setting.

2003

The affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium, in spite of dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery. Recent developments in paper, printing and wand technologies may lead to the widespread use of digitally augmented paper in the near future, thereby enabling the paper and digital worlds to be linked together. We are interested in using these technologies to achieve a true integration of printed and digital information sources such that users may browse freely back and forth between paper and digital resources. We present web-based server technologies that support this integration by allowing users to dynamically link areas of printed documents to objects of an application database. The server component is implemented using the eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA) and is independent of the particular paper, printing and reader technologies used to realise the digitally augmented paper. The framework presented manages semantic information about application objects, documents, users, links and client devices and it supports universal client access.

CRAFT–EPFL Rolex …

This article describes a method for extracting and classifying handwritten annotations on printed documents using a simple camera integrated in a lamp or a mobile phone. The ambition of such a research is to offer a seamless integration of notes taken on printed paper in our daily interactions with digital documents. Existing studies propose a classification of annotations based on their form and function. We demonstrate a method for automating such a classification and report experimental results showing the classification accuracy.

Transactions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

In this work we propose to present an application that supports the representation of manuscript documents according to an ontological approach. The implementation of this application makes it possible to annotate semantically these manuscripts according to the ontology "OMOS" [1]. The semantic annotation proposed here is an annotation based on an ontology of the "OMOS" manuscripts of generation and use of specific metadata targeted to allow new methods of access to information and to extend existing ones. The proposed annotation is based on the understanding that the named entities (the author, date 'link ... etc.) mentioned in the documents constitute an important part of their semantics. Finally, this application gives us an annotation file associated with each document.