Type of site | SocialAnnotations, Highlighting |
|---|---|
| Created by | Textensor Limited |
| URL | a |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | Jan 2008 |
| Current status | Inactive |
A.nnotate is a discontinued web service for storing and annotating documents. It closed on 30th of November 2023 because it was no longer generating enough revenue to support the costs of maintaining it.[1]
Documents were either uploaded by the user or fetched from a web address supplied by the user. Uploads were accepted asPDF,Microsoft Word, office formats supported byOpenOffice and common image formats. When a URL of a web page was entered, the service makes a local copy of the HTML and stylesheet. The service offered a browserbookmarklet to facilitate making snapshots of web pages.
Uploaded documents were rendered as images on the server, and the images were sent to the user's browser for display and annotation. Annotation with regions and arrows was supported for all documents. For text documents, the server alsosent the positions of words on the page, allowing the client to offer text search and highlighting. Annotations could be displayed in the right-hand margin, as floating boxes above the text, or as footnotes. For web snapshots, they could also be displayed within the main text flow.
By default, all documents and annotations were private. A user could issue invitations by email to allow other users toview and annotate a particular document or to access all documents in a folder. A "reply" option on annotations allowedother users to comment on existing annotations, offering a form ofThreaded discussion. Access controls allowed the document owner to specify what annotators may do, including viewing each other's annotations and defining new tags.
Early development of A.nnotate was enabled by proof-of-concept funding to Textensor Limited,from the Scottish Government for a project on authoring structured content from text.[2]The resulting software, "Notate" is described in a white paper from 2007[3]which included support forsemantic web authoring.
In 2008 the company started selling standalone versions of the system for installation on local hardware and developed anAPI allowing web application developers and systems integrators to add annotation capabilities to existingdocument management systems. It offers off the shelf modules for integration withDocumentum andMoodle.
Documents were accepted asPDF,Microsoft Office formats,ODF formats and images as PNG, JPEG and GIF.The client browser required javascript and cookies to be enabled. A.nnotate could be used withFirefox,Internet Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8),Safari orGoogle Chrome[4]