BTW (“By The Way…”) Information Annotation By Rudd Stevens, Jason Endo University of San Francisco

Introduction Current methods of sharing knowledge between users: Blogs, , bulletin boards, instant messaging, websites. All require users to know location of information in order to share data and knowledge. (Search engines aside). Necessitates a context change from the initial page.

Problem Statement We would like to connect objects and users easily and intuitively on the web, without knowing location information and negating the need for a context switch. Objects represent collections of information, people, documents etc. User would be able to create and annotate objects. A web (browser) based solution would be ideal because it’s platform independent.

Related Work “Magpie: Towards a Semantic Web Browser”, Dzbor, M., et al. Implemented as an Internet Explorer (IE) extension. Interprets the Semantic Web through ontologies. Uses a user specified ontology to associate a semantic layer of the web with the current web page. Highlights related text.

Related Work “NuggetMine: Intelligent Groupware for Opportunistically Sharing Information Nuggets”, Goecks, J., Cosley, D. Groupware application for a limited network with Java desktop client. Presents the user with a sequence of “nuggets” of potentially interesting information. Uses a set group of categories to classify the nuggets. Utilizes a server to store and build associations between nuggets.

Related Work “How to Make a Semantic Web Browser” (Haystack) Quan, D., Karger, DR. Full fledged desktop application. Collects semantic information from different sources and presents it to the user. Allows navigation between pieces of information. Goal is to facilitate the division and re-combination of information to create a more personalized, meaningful compilation for the user. The system is based on the information being encoded using RDF to contain and classify the content.

Our Solution Create web related interface (Mozilla Firefox browser extension) for exchanging information between users. Allow users to create annotations (nuggets) related to static information sources. Provide automatic notification of related objects for a given web page. Central server for storing nuggets and servicing requests.

What is a nugget? An “object” representing some entity. The entity could be a person, paper, book, conference or film, etc. The nugget could be a short biographical note on a person, a comment on an article or a snippet of code describing a concept. The information is encoded via XML to provide commonality and persistence.

Structure/Operation Information Source Server Client URL ID tag Web page with URL ID tag Submit nugget to server Return list of nuggets Request for web page

Client Application Mozilla Firefox browser extension allows user to create, view, edit and annotate nuggets. Provides automatic notification of nuggets related to a site. Search interface allows search across nugget repository by keyword. Ease of installation and use. Compatible cross platform, using XUL and Javascript.

Server Consists of a Java Servlet that receives and sends via REST. Uses the Jetty Servlet container. MySQL database provides persistence and storage for nuggets and created associations. Nugget associations are stored in a table of triples, providing easy manipulation of data.

Nugget Associations Recognize and connect relations between nuggets. Associations are created when a nugget is submitted, using the relation fields to find related material. authorOf, creatorOf, editorOf, studentOf, etc. Additional nugget types will allow expanded associations. MemberOf, etc.

Demonstration Features: Creating nuggets Viewing related nuggets Annotating existing nuggets Editing nuggets Search nugget database View nugget associations

Future Work Lucene search index Peer-to-Peer configuration Additional nugget types Referral System, user ranking.

Summary Create a method for users to annotate static information sources. Allow creation of “nugget” entities that can represent a given object. Unique entity that can be associated with other entities and annotated to create a collection of related information.

References Our website: The Semantic Web Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O. (2001) Magpie – towards a semantic web browser, Dzbor, M., Domingue, J., Motta, E. NuggetMine: Intelligent Groupware for Opportunistically Sharing, Goecks, J., Cosley, D. (2002) Semantic Search, Guha, R., McCool, R., Miller, E. (2003) How to Make a Semantic Web Browser, Quan, D., Karger, DR. (2004)