A dedicated group of individuals worked diligently toward a web annotation standard — the idea being that annotation is something that will be fundamental to the future of the web and should be interoperable, and eventually incorporated into browsers. The first chance for a face to face meeting of this new group came during the 2014 W3C TPAC meeting in Santa Clara, California, October 27-31. This year also happened to be particularly special in that it was the 25th anniversary of the web and the 20th anniversary of the W3C.

We decided to take advantage of the opportunity to capture the insights of some of the key people working on annotation standards, those who have a historical perspective on how we got here, and why it’s important — including the inventor of the web and the Director of the W3C, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who mentioned annotation as one of the web’s requirements in his initial proposal in 1989. Learn more and watch the video on our companion blog post.