Hypothesis Joins the National Information Standards Organization

Hypothesis has long been a believer in a standards-based future for communications on the web. We worked with the W3C for three years to gain approval for annotation as a web standard — a milestone which happened on 23 February, 2017. We’re pleased to announce that also in 2017 we joined the National Information Standards Organization to support, build, and promote a standards-based ecosystem for information.

To learn more about adopting open annotation in your own publications, contact Heather Staines, Director of Partnerships at Hypothesis and subscribe to news from Hypothesis.

Anyone interested in joining the ESSOAr community can contact essoar@essoar.org.

Browsers work — allowing us to pull in content from many different places and work across multiple tabs. Email works — we can communicate and collaborate with folks using a myriad of different email clients. These systems work because they are based on standards. We believe that annotation use cases will proliferate, changing the way we read, research, collaborate around, and discover content, provided that annotation, like browsers and email, is also based on standards. Adherence and support of standards ensures an interoperable future. Regardless of the annotation client that I use, it should be able to listen to and interact with your annotations. Standards-based APIs should enable me to maintain control over my annotations and to move them to another service should I choose.

I have long been a supporter of standards and best practices. From 2009 to 2011, I served on the ESPreSSO working group that created recommended practices for Single Sign On. From 2013 to the present, I’ve participated in Project Transfer, refining best practices for journals that transfer from one publisher to another. Just last year, I joined the Board of Directors for Project COUNTER just in time to work on Release 5 which will streamline reporting and analysis of online usage statistics for articles and chapters. I couldn’t be more excited that Hypothesis has joined NISO.

Hypothesis is proud to join NISO and its other members to work together towards an interoperable, standards-based future for annotation in our larger world of information.