Annotations and Hypertrails with SpreadCrumbs – An Easy Way to Annotate, Refind and Share

Annotations have been shown to be an important activity during reading, especially during “active reading”. Annotations support understanding, interpretation, sensemaking and scannability. As valuable as in paper-based contexts, digital online annotations provide several benefits for annotators and collaborators. To study the impact of these benefits we present in this paper SpreadCrumbs, a straightforward Web annotation tool. SpreadCrumbs offers simple annotation’s interactions and metaphors that support most of the users’ annotations needs in the digital environment by enhancing the web experience with “in-context” annotations and providing a unique form of social navigation support with hypertrails. The results of our studies with the tool show the importance of annotations, the empirical outperformance of “in-context” annotations over other methods, and the outcome benefits of supporting social navigation.

Venue: WEBIST2010

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

The Art of Multi-faceted Tagging – Interweaving Spatial Annotations, Categories, Meaningful URIs and Tags

In this paper we present TagMe!, a tagging and exploration front-end for Flickr images, which enables users to attach tag assignments to a specific area within an image and to categorize tag assignments. We analyze the differences between tags and categories and show how both facets can be applied to learn semantic relations between concepts referenced by tags and categories. TagMe! automatically maps tags and categories to DBpedia URIs to clearly define the meaning. In our experiments we compare different strategies to realize such semantic mappings and show that already lightweight approaches map tags and categories with high precisions (86.85% and 93.77% respectively). We further discuss how multi-faceted tagging helps to improve the retrieval of folksonomy entities. The TagMe! system is currently available at http://tagme.groupme.org

 

Venue: WEBIST2010

Authors:  Fabian Abel, Ricardo Kawase, Daniel Krause, Patrick Siehndel and Nicole Ullmann