A.nnotate
Early development of A.nnotate was enabled by proof-of-concept funding to Textensor Limited,
from the Scottish Government for a project on authoring structured content from text
The resulting software, "Notate" is described in a white paper from 2007
which included support for semantic web authoring. In 2008 the company started selling standalone versions of the system for installation on local hardware and developed an
API allowing web application developers and systems integrators to add annotation capabilities to existing document management systems. It offers off the shelf modules for integration with Documentum and Moodle. Documents are accepted as PDF, Microsoft Office formats, ODF formats and images as PNG, JPEG and GIF. The client browser requires javascript and cookies to be enabled. A.nnotate can be used with
Firefox, Internet Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), Safari or Google chrome The first release received positive coverage from many bloggers, e.g.:
"I have yet to find the perfect online collaboration tool. A.nnotate is a service that gets as close as anything I've found on the Web." on makeuseof.com
CNET calls it a "real fun annotation tool (at least fun compared to Microsoft Word)"
LifeHacker discusses its uses for peer review; KillerStartups says it seems "very easy to use"
Rev2.org notes that to date "annotations ... haven't really taken off"
and wonders if A.nnotate can finally bring document annotation to life. BNet.com business tips notes that A.nnotate is a better for online privacy with sharing documents than Google Docs. The Library 2.0 blog notes that it could be very useful in education for marking assignments, but considers pricing a possible drawback as the free version limits the number of documents you can upload
Reviews
A.nnotate is a web service for storing and annotating documents.