Annotate! A tool for collaborative information retrieval

Difficulties with web-based full text information retrieval (IR) systems include spurious matches, manually intensive document sifting, and the absence of communication or coordination between users. To address these difficulties, we introduce the Annotate system which enables document annotations, and captures global usage history. Annotate! provides improved data and metadata clues to guide the user in a search session. Two data sets, declared in XML, are at the core of Annotate!: discussion data, a composite of documents and user annotations and session data which captures user timings at the various interface layers. We discuss a prototype implementation, and show that the collaborative infrastructure enabled by Annotate! can be predicted to improve the diffusion of ideas in the search community.