Active Annotations of Web Pages

The World Wide Web (WWW) incorporates a huge potential for collaborative working. This paper focuses on Web page annotations that can enhance group–working on the Web drastically. A model of Web page annotations is introduced that defines relations between the users, the Web pages and their annotations. It is taken together with technological restrictions of existing approaches to form a taxonomy and an overview of the state of the art. Our « active annotations » approach results from the observation that in current implementations the temporal relations are left out. Active annotations are focused on synchronous notification mechanisms within the Web and are implemented in the platform–independent language Java. Their purpose is to support collaborative work within small groups.