Introducing Groups to an Annotation System

Annotation of online documents has become an important practice, allowing the addition of valuable information to existing resources without corrupting them, thus introducing a novel way of user collaboration. The MADCOW annotation system provides services for annotating multimedia contents in HTML pages. Introducing groups with their related services to the MADCOW system enhances the security and privacy of annotations for group members as well as their collaboration. Usability problems arose with respect to the identification of significant matches between users’ interests and group topics, to support the process of admitting users to groups. Therefore, the use of matching methods based on ontologies and URL comparison enhances the joining process with respect to time, effort and relevance. This research illustrates our current work for introducing groups to the MADCOW system and inspecting the Groups-Users relevance problem by analyzing and implementing relevance measurements.