Re: Using Apache Annotator

[Randall Leeds <ra...@apache.org>]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020 at 11:03 AM Tal August <ta...@cs.washington.edu>
wrote:

> Hi Annotator dev team,
>
> I'm a graduate student looking to build a lightweight annotation system for
> annotating science news articles with common writing strategies. The
> initial project is to crowdsource these annotations, but eventually my goal
> is to shift this to a volunteer-based system where people can log on to
> annotate articles as a way of improving their own writing.
>

Welcome, Tal! Sounds like a great project and exactly the sort of thing
we'd like to support.


> I have been talking with Jon Udell at Hypothes.is about using their stack
> for this project, but it sounds like it might be overkill since right now
> all I need is a way of embedding annotation into a webpages I will be
> serving and saving these annotations to my database. Annotator.js looked
> ideal for the project, but it seems like it's in maintenance mode now and
> Apache Annotator is its successor.
>

Annotator.js is indeed in maintenance mode. That project receives support
requests not infrequently, but I have little time to answer and my energy
is focused here.


> Would you recommend I use annotator.js or does Apache Annotator also
> provide this functionality?
>

The primary difference between the projects is that Apache Annotator is
focused on solving low level challenges facing developers rather than on
providing an drop-in application for publishers. By solving common
challenges we hope to enable developers to focus on higher level concerns
that are specific to their application domains.

We are in the process of making our first official release right now. The
initial focus is on reliably translating browser text selections to JSON
and vice versa.


> Happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you also for building
> this amazing tool! I have spent the last week looking over annotation
> toolkits, and it's awesome what you are building.
>

Thank you, Tal! We've been getting Apache Annotator started slowly, and
welcome your involvement in any capacity. Several of us in the community
hang out in the #annotator channel on the Freenode IRC server if you want
to chat in realtime.

Hope to hear from you again soon. Watch this list for announcements about
the release and keep us informed of any of your successes and *especially*
failures to get started with the project.