In-Context Annotations for Refinding and Sharing

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 further explore the real benefits of online annotations, we implemented a simple Web Annotation tool, SpreadCrumbs, to support our studies. The tool provides a simple annotation mechanism, simulating real-world paper-based annotations. In addition, the tool supports search, sharing capabilities and social navigation. We conducted a series of user studies that empirically demonstrates the benefits of “in-context” annotations for refinding and sharing.

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Eelco Herder, George Papadakis and Wolfgang Nejdl

PDF: kawase-webist-selected2010

TagMe!: Enhancing Social Tagging with Spatial Context

TagMe! is a tagging and exploration front-end for Flickr images, which enables users to annotate specific areas of an image, i.e. users can attach tag assignments to a specific area within an image and further categorize the tag assignments. Additionally, TagMe! automatically maps tags and categories to DBpedia URIs to clearly define the meaning. In this work we discuss 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. We also expose the benefits of the visual (spatial) context of the tag assignments, with respect to ranking algorithms for search and retrieval of relevant items. We do so by analyzing metrics of size and position of the annotated areas. Finally, in our experiments we compare different strategies to realize semantic mappings and show that already lightweight approaches map tags and categories with high precisions (86.85% and 93.77% respectively). The TagMe! system is currently available at http://tagme.groupme.org .

Venue: WEBIST2010 (Selected Papers)

Authors:  Fabian Abel, Nicola Henze, Ricardo Kawase, Daniel Krause and Patrick Siehndel

PDF: abel-webist-selected2010