AWS - Annotation Web Service

AWS (Annotation Web Service) is a Web Service for managing shared annotations (notes, comments, explanations) of multimendia documents. You can think of annotations as notes, comments or explanations which one can attach to all kind of multimedia documents. Those annotations are stored on a central server and can be shared with other users over the internet. It allows the creation of private, public or group annotations.

The Server is accessible via a web service by using SOAP-RPC. So it's easy to develop an application which uses this web service's functionality or to extend an existing application to use the abbility to store annotations. Have a look at the WSDL file on this page or at the documentation for details.

This Web Services can be thought of as a framework which can be extended to allow different kinds of documents to be annotated. This is achieved through a flexible and extensible datastructure which enables you to specify own anchors or anchoring strategies for linking annotations to different kinds of documents. Thus it is imaginable to anchor annotations to text, HTML, Video, Audio etc. or even anchor annotations to annotations. It is also possible to annotate a document with another document of some kind.

If you want to experiment with the annotation server via SOAP-RPC try the test annotation server at http://volzotan.informatik.uni-freiburg.de:8080/axis/services/Aws.

Feel free to contact me for suggestions and critics!