1
Enhancing documents with annotations and
machine-readable structured information using Notate
Robert Cannon and Fred Howell
Textensor Limited, www.textensor.com
4th March 2007
http://www.textensor.com/enhancing-documents-2007.html
Summary
Textensor Limited is developing tools for improving the communication and exploitation of text based
information. Our main product, Notate, is a web based system that enables authors and readers to layer
structured annotations on top of documents so that the resulting combination can be reliably processed
automatically while maintaining the integrity of the original source and the provenance of all annotations.
The system has a wide variety of applications including attaching sticky notes and discussions to web
pages, sharing documents and notes within a small group, on-line document review and sophisticated
data curation tasks. It aims to bring the authoring of semantically rich structures within the capabilities of
normal users, making it dramatically easier to produce well-structured content and opening up possibil-
ities for further automated processes such as creating indexes to the research literature and curating more
high-quality information into databases. The initial requirements and example applications are taken
from the needs of the biomedical research community, but the core technology is not domain specific and
has similar applications in other fields that deal with large volumes of documents containing complex
and interlinked information.
This white paper describes the origin of the underlying ideas for Notate in hypertext and web research
communities, and places our work in the context of other recent advances in web technologies such as
semantic wikis and 'Web 2.0'.
Figure 1. Notate starts with documents. Terms of interest are highlighted and notes and 'tags' can be
attached - here different people, projects and companies are annotated. Connections between terms
can also be expressed (such as who works for which project), and the resulting web of structured
i