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What has been most interesting to us, just over this last year, has been a fairly significant burst of interest in the utilization of annotation in a research context. For instance, among the scholarly communication grants The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is considering for funding this summer, approximately half involve annotation in one guise or another. This is quite striking.

To do this, Hypothes.is aims to create a cross-platform annotation systemOpens in a new window that would essentially function as a layer on top of the existing web, allowing users to comment on pages, pictures, video, documents, or data. This open annotation would allow discussion to take place on any web real estate, not beholden to those who control the pages.

Hypothes.is showed their impressive contribution with two open source projects with huge potential: Epub.js and their own hypothes.is.

Dan Whaley is the founder of Hypothes.is, a company that promises an open annotation web experience where anyone can comment on anything.

One example comes from the San Francisco non-profit hypothes.is, where Books in Browsers’ Peter Brantley is based. The company is working to develop “an open platform for the collaborative evaluation of knowledge” — annotation. Their explanatory video takes you from from the beginning of recorded information to our current moment of the search for universal collaborative commentary.

In this episode, Peter Brantley, the director of scholarly communication at the start-up Hypothes.is, talks with host Stewart Wills about the firm’s efforts to build an open annotation layer on the Web, his thoughts on how in-line annotation differs, in both spirit and potential, from the more common practice of online comment streams, and some possible applications in scholarly communication, publishing, and peer review.

Was Mosaic nicht schaffte, will nun das Projekt Hypothes.is erreichen. 2011 als Crowdfunding-Projekt gestartet, macht das Nonprofit-Projekt seitdem immer wieder kleine Fortschritte. Am Ende soll eine verteilte, offene Plattform stehen, über die Nutzer wie im Peer-Review-Verfahren der Wissenschaft einzelne Sätze markieren und Informationen bewerten können. Statt Kommentar-Inseln auf einzelnen Websites oder bei Twitter entstünde ein über das Netz waberndes Band an Anmerkungen – so zumindest die Idee.

This kind of tool has the potential to further democratize the web, by making the comments and conversation surrounding a piece of writing just as important — if not moreso — than the original text. That is something compelling that could, and would, bring me out of my RSS shell and back onto the open web.

I think the way tech first evolved, it was highly community-oriented and focused on shared goals and shared objectives, and I think we lost some of that,” says Whaley. “But I think there are elements of it that are coming back, because of the explosion of open source and collaborative systems, and also some fatigue with the commercial infrastructure we conduct our affairs on — Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. They give us service we want, but impose a tax for doing so, and, for me — I think there’s a different future.

Thinking back to the foundation of the World Wide Web, annotation was actually a critical component of what Sir Tim Berners-Lee conceived of as an interconnected store of research documents for CERN.