Putting the gloss on paper: a framework for cross-media annotation.

The article provides information on the general frame-work for cross-media annotation. Annotation is a means of marking up a document so that it augments the existing material. Annotations could be used to explain terms occurring in a document, thereby providing direct access into a glossary during the reading process. Annotations come in many forms and have a variety of uses. Many systems are available that support either formal or informal annotations, but there are few systems that support both forms and mixed forms, and allow navigation back and forth between structured and unstructured annotations. Display devices access the annotation framework through a flexible content delivery platform called "XIMA." The process of annotating frequently includes adding new content to the system. The sharing of link knowledge within the frameworks, and collaboration between different distributed link services and users, has always been a goal of the open hypermedia community. The authoring of the links can be covered in a generic way by the "iServer" core system, but the anchoring of the links in a resource is implemented by the specific resource type plug-ins.