AA2: Secure Annotations

Overview:

Annotations have long been used as a a tool to facilitate collaborative scholarly discourse. They enable users to attach additional material such as comments, notes, queries, assessments, references to resources such as documents, images or datasets. When applied to digital resources shared via the Web, they provide a very powerful collaborative tool - enabling the easy capture and wide dissemination of individuals' and group opinions of particular digital resources.

The main focus of this work is to provide annotation tools for collaborators within eResearch environments. A critical requirement for such a domain is the need to be able to restrict access to annotations attached to a particular collection of digital resources, to a particular group of trusted colleagues - for reasons of privacy, confidentiality or protection of intellectual property. Particularly in eScience, the annotation or interpretation of the raw document or data is often more valuable than the resource it annotates. Also by providing researchers with a robust, reliable security infrastructure, they may be more willing to engage in the exchange of views and ideas.

People:

Imran Khan

Jane Hunter

Publications:

• R. Schroeter, J. Hunter, M. Henderson and I. Khan. "A Synchronous Multimedia Annotation System for Secure Collaboratories" (yet to be published)
• Imran Khan, Ronald Schroeter and Jane Hunter. "Implementing a Secure Annotation Service" , International Provenance and Annotation Workshop, Chicago, USA. 3 - 5 May 2006.

Presentations:

• I. Khan, AA2 - Secure Annotations, DART workshop, April 2006

Outcomes:

• Annotation Server

Links:

• Annotea
• Shibboleth
• XACML
• Annozilla
• Amaya