Sharing annotations better: RESTful Open Annotation

Annotations are increasingly created and shared online and connected with web resources such as databases of real-world entities. Recent collaborative efforts to provide interoperability between online annotation tools and resources have introduced the Open Annotation (OA) model, a general framework for representing annotations based on web standards. Building on the OA model, we propose to share annotations over a minimal web interface that conforms to the Representational State Transfer architectural style and uses the JSON for Linking Data representation (JSON-LD). We introduce tools supporting this approach and apply it to several existing annotation clients and servers, demonstrating direct interoperability between tools and resources that were previously unable to exchange information. The specification and tools are available from http://restoa.github.io/.