A Social Validation of Collaborative Annotations on Digital Documents

In this paper, we present the annotation purposes for a personal as well as for a collective use. In the context of digital documents, annotation systems allow not only to annotate passages but also to comment or reply to annotations within discussion threads (similar feature than forum’s one). Thus, readers can express their points of view, debate and even reach a consensus about annotated passages in the context of the documents. Moreover, thanks to this reply feature, people can respond to annotations for criticizing them. Therefore, a reader can explore the thread for evaluating the main annotation reliability according to the reactions of previous readers. As this mental work could be painful in the presence of numerous replies and answer levels, we describe, in this paper, an algorithm that computes annotations reliability. Annotation reliability relies on a synthesis of comments given for this annotation. It can be considered as a social validation of the annotation content. By using this reliability calculation, annotation systems can highlight the most reliable annotations, for instance. This visual adaptation can relieve readers from mentally identifying trustworthy annotations. Consequently, this leads to decreasing their cognitive overload.