Annotating all Knowledge: Adventures in Interoperability

The Annotating All Knowledge Coalition was founded as a forum for accelerating the development of a pervasive interoperable annotation layer across all scholarly works. Figuring out what, exactly, an interoperable annotation layer means was one of the first goals of the coalition. We took the first steps towards defining what an interoperable layer looks like and how it should operate at our Face to Face meetings at FORCE2016 and I Annotate. So what are the next steps? Participants in both events felt strongly that the best way to move forward was to "Just do it", that is, identify a use case where you have a need to share annotations across: tools, content, platforms, workflows. Interoperability can be realized at many different levels, so the goal is explore some of the practical issues that will have to be addressed by trying to implement even basic functionality. With these practical examples in hand, we can start to focus on critical aspects of interoperability in year 2. In that spirit, folks at Pundit and Hypothesis, two open web-based annotation tools, got together to conduct a little interoperability exploration using our respective tools.