Wired-marker

Web annotation Hyper-anchor demo =TI:A development and deployment of browser plug-in for publishable sub-page level hyperlinks = AU: Takuro Tamura and Kousaku Okubo

=Citation practice is essential but its resolution remains in paper age=
 * In the field where technology advances rapidly, the major obstacles in deploying the technology to the society are sometimes social and pragmatic factors.


 * An example may be enhancement of resolution in citation network in scholarly publication.
 * (It establishes credit and priority among researchers, minimizes the redundant description, and consequently ensures the integrity and progressiveness of science. In periodicals, textbooks, or databases, we usually refer to original journal articles in scholarly materials. )


 * Since its invention in more than 200 years ago until the present days of digital communication, reference to journal articles, either in on line journals or academic websites, stays at the level of an article, or a resource file, even when only a specific segment in a long article is relevant in the context. (Williams 2011)
 * (In its early days, some authors tried to introduce sub-article level resolution(Mark 1881)but never lasted. Conceivable reasons are cost of printed space, readability exceeded the benefit.  Critical readers collect the hard copies of whole articles, with top page for a title to the last page for reference after all.  In the present days, none of above mentioned reasons remains any more.)
 * However, in the last decade, there arose growing numbers of services that allow readers of web pages to place yellow markers and in-place notes for their own revisit or for sharing with others. With the same set of technologies, citation links to an arbitrary segment of a web-article appears to be achievable.


 * For those who feel as such, it is very frustrating to scan a long article for relevant segment only to restore the sub-article level address lost in the communication.


 * 1) R.B. Williams, (2011) "Citation systems in the biosciences: A history, classification and descriptive terminology", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 67 Iss: 6, pp.995 - 1014
 * 2) Mark, E.L.(1881), "Maturation, fecundation, and segmentation of Limax campestris, Binney", Bulletin of the Miseum of Comparative Zoology, Vol.6 no.2,pp173-625.

=Related works and Task definition= Technological elements necessary for fine granular citation network are all available for some time, as mentioned. Accordingly, our task is to define the limitation and pragmatic barriers that have been prevented the technique to be applied in citation network and find the correct arrangement of elements which would by-pass those limitations and barriers.

Firstly, URI syntax preserves a method to address within a web page, precisely put, to make hyperlinks to secondary resources marked in the resource file. (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986) Accordingly, for the publishers, it is not difficult to divide an web-article into segments which can be independently linked by other articles. Limitation is that segmentation need to be placed beforehand and deployment to all publishers and web sites will be the biggest obstacles.

In some of the services called digital library, web annotation, or publishers web site, users can put notes to an arbitrary position or segment of a web page. In such services, however, the sub-page address is valid only to the materials they store. Although some services allow users to upload copies of relevant materials to their public server (for example annotea), it is illegal when applied to copyrighted materials and materials with price tags.

In addition, one of the earliest work for web annotation by Ka-Ping Yee, called CritLink, should be mentioned. It used proxy-server to issue and store addresses valid to the general www when accessed through this proxy. This seemed ideal way to make sub-page level links across the web accessible materials. But their idea was not applied to enhancing resolution of citation links. One possible reason is that access control to commercial materials will be confused because all readers appears to access from this proxy.

In short, the third party server, either archival or proxy, have not provide solution. Accordingly, we set our task to create a method that needs no intervention of our server.


 * Robert A. Arko D-Lib Magazine May 2006 Volume 12 Number 5 Using Annotations to Add Value to a Digital Library for Education
 * Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 28, issues 7–11, p. 1063. Pan-Browser Support for Annotations and Other Meta-Information on the World Wide Web Matthew A. Schickler, Murray S. Mazer, and Charles Brooks
 * K.-P. Yee. CritLink: Better Hyperlinks for the WWW. Submitted to Hypertext '98, Apr. 1998. http://crit.org/http://crit.org/~ping/ht98.html.
 * Computer Networks Volume 39, Issue 5, 5 August 2002, Pages 589–608 Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Web annotations J. Kahana,, , M.-R. Koivunenb, 1, , E. Prud'Hommeauxb, , R.R. Swickb, http://www.annotea.org/eswc2005/01_koivunen_final.pdf

=Design=

The key idea was to record the sub-page address, position of "yellow marker" we may say, as additional rendering parameter for the relevant web-page. We used the fragment identifier component of URI to write down this parameter. The appended URI will look like, "http://original_resource_address # yellow_marker_address". If we put all the necessary information to apply the yellow marker in the appendage fragment, no intervention of distant server is required to reproduce it. Since, in URI syntax, the message in the fragment started with "#" is designed to processed by the browser upon request, resurrection of highlighted state can be achieved by the browser augmentation. If the browser is not augmented, the appendage message is simply ignored.

Implementation
When users paste this appended URI in proper context of an html file, it works as a sub-page level hyperlink. When the browser request the above URI, browser receive and visualizes the web page. At the same time, the deserializing unit clips the fragment component, resurrect the highlighted status and apply the indicated background color and scroll to the marker potion.
 * We implemented the above functionality in a plug-in module for the web browsers. The plug-in has "serializing unit" and "deserializing unit".  The serializing unit receives the memory state of mouse-dragging from the window system and translate in the logical addresses of the marker. The start and the end position of the dragged region roughly in XML pass language(X-path)and the exact margins by clipping a few letters at the margins. Plug-in then outputs the appended URI to the clipboard memory.


 * The steps for writing and reading articles with sub-page level reference links will be as simple as follows;

1. Author mouse-drags over the region of interest when reading an on line journal article for reference 2. Author initiate the plug-in process and pastes the content of the clipboard memory in place for hyperlink in his manuscript.  3. Publisher or author disseminate the hypertext article  4. Readers click on the link while reading the author's article 5-a. The browser with plug-in generate a page image of cited article and scroll to the yellow marker.  5-b. The browser without plug-in generate the same page without marker.  5-c. The browsers who do not have the access right to the cited material will be prompted to buy it. When he pays he is 5-a,b.


 * Comparison of fine-granular hyperlinks


 * XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0 W3C Recommendation 16 November 1999

=Deployment to the society and Feedbacks= Initially, the hyper-anchor mechanism was implemented in the the multifunctional group annotation tool "wired-marker" for the Japanese ministry of education's project and many additional functions were implemented according to the request from the project. Most importantly, copyright issues were not mentioned as described below.

Via the Mozilla's down load portal, "wired-marker" were downloaded more than half a million times in the last 6 years and 13,900 active users are counted as of today according to the Mozilla plug-in portal. Some of the users kindly posted comments most of which were preferable. Ironically, however, not a small numbers of users complained about the fact that the marked pages can not be accessed off line, without noticing this plug-in works without illegal copying of resources. Others recommended to use it in combination with cloud service which we avoided.

In several examples, academic groups reported the use cases of the wired-marker in their education or research projects. They liked the way the markers are recorded as a list of URLs in their computer which gives them freedom in downstream processing. Paste in communication or store in bookmark organizers.

From either source of feed backs, we found that this plug-in is preferably used in sociological studies as what they call "qualitative data analysis (QDA) tool". In QDA it appears that most of the raw data are in text and research is to pick and gather important elements from the raw material for the next step of organization into a theory or a story. During this step, every scrap need to be linked to the original position to be reviewed in the original context. This is somewhat similar to righting review articles with heaps of references. If they do not "copy the material" but "quote from the material" properly, the data they gathered can be published. We hope this is along the line to publication with fine granular hyperlinks.

Pages 45-48 ACM New York, NY, USA
 * Yuta: Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (2009 (pp. 2121-2126). Used in Web scrapping and analysis of scrapped site.
 * Eine Bewegung für die Wahrheit? René König (2009) : Universität BielefeldFakultät für Soziologie. For an extensive analysis of variations in descriptions on one issue in various web sites. they scrapped  relevant descriptions with direct links from web materials. Used in QDA.
 * Teruyoshi Hishiki, Mami Suzuki Takaki, Somyong Park, Kyoko Takano： Collaboration with Wired-Marker, a browser add-on to highlight Web pages.  AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium  1 (1) ：950, 2009
 * Project aloha :Fallahkhair, Sanaz and Kennedy, Ian (2010) Project Aloha: indexing, highlighting and annotation. : Comparison of hard copy to on line version in as material for critical reading.
 * Atti della IV Conferenza Italiana sul Software Libero(2010)– UN APPROCCIO LIBERO: Wired-marker for qualitative data analysis (QDA). quotation/address pair is central to QDA.
 * Mi computadora desde el llavero USB (My computer in USB):by C Bravo Reyes - In DIM: Didáctica, Innovación y Multimedia (Teaching Inovation Multimedia), 2010 Recommendation to student as book marker.  addresses in a list of URL.
 * The 2nd DBCLS BioHackathon (2011): interoperable bioinformatics Web services for integrated applications Web annotation and scrap. Mother project for wired-marker.
 * Giaco Podrei: Simple conversational practices in the case of free and open source software infrastructure (2012) Combined with to Scapbook, and FloatNote. To gather and analyze line-marked issues. Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Exploratory Papers, Workshop Descriptions, Industry Cases - Volume 2

=Discussion and Prospects= By the test in the real world for 6 years, in addition to our own test, we are confident in the persistent function of the plug-in for fixed materials as well as materials with small alterations which do not affect the XML tree structure. Nevertheless, we are well aware that this technique is not applied to the real publication yet. Firstly, not only the authors who cites, but also the readers need to have this plug-in to participate in the communication, unless similar enhancement is added to general browsers. Secondly, substantial fraction of articles to be cited in scholarly journals are still in the form of pdf files. Lastly, but not least importantly, it is still unclear if this method is truly lawful when applied to commercial on-line articles. The opinion of our counselor is that it is less likely but still possible that parsing the XML data structure may claimed as violation of the license agreement in subscription of commercial journals in some cases. According to their advice we did not explicitly describe that this plug-in does not violate copyright if applied to commercial papers. However, considering that no web journals can be visualized without parsing the structure by the browser, such complain dose not have firm ground. Moreover, the new value generated by the high resolution citation is not stolen from their hands but given to their hands. In summary, now the technology is combined in the form which do not interfere with the present publishing mechanism nor violate the copyright law, probably.

During rounds of version ups, various requests for functional enhancements were incorporated and eventually our original concept became blurred. So, the original concept was reproduced in much slimmer plug-in "hyper-anchor", later. In addition to the FireFox add-on, the extensions for Internet Explorers and Google chromes were also developed for the slimmer version. We hope wiki based web sites may be the best point to start further spreading. To encourage wiki based users, especially for QDA reserachers and review writers, "copy this address and the text" is added to the menu of action to the highlight. With this function, making linked quotation with fine granular hyperlink is as easy as copy and paste.

"'Formal, structured annotation metadata provides a mechanism by which digital libraries can provide additional information about library resources above and beyond that which is included in the master resource metadata record.'"

"'Annotations are virtual modifications of data objects by patrons - these modifications exist separately from the data but may be always displayed with the data for a particular user or group, thereby effecting a 'virtual' modification [Løkken 1993].'"

"Shared Web Annotations as a Platform for Third−Party Value−Added, Information Providers: Architecture, Protocols, and Usage Examples"

=Downloads= The action of the add-on are demonstrated on the Hyper-anchor demo
 * Hyper-anchor download site;
 * FireFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hyper-anchor/
 * Explorer and chrome: http://www.hyper-anchor.org/en/
 * Wired-marker (additive function) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wired-marker/

=Unorganized memo=
 * 1) Web page annotation and sharing among users:
 * 2) * Web annotation is addressed memos. Gathering annotation in one central server and share them is easy. Many publishers is providing such services.  However, such annotation do not go outside the server because address is not transmittable.
 * 3) MaC at Work by David Sparks