DiLAS: a Digital Library Annotation Service

In most contemporary digital library management systems (DLMS) the contents are conveyed to the user as a “collection of information items”, which can be searched or browsed. However, this paradigm is often not sufficient to cope with embedded usages, for which access to the contents is not seen as an isolated activity, but as part of a larger work process, where interaction with other users, editing and annotating documents need to be integrated. Up to now, annotations have been - in most cases - stored together with the documents they refer to in a central DL repository. With the advent of decentralized DL architectures in Grid or Peer-to-Peer environments, but also in Service-oriented architectures, these design choices need to be revised by technical solutions that allow us to manage annotations independently from a particular DLMS. To this end, the authors are participating in a research project, named Digital Library Annotation Service (DiLAS), aimed at designing and developing an architecture and a framework able to support and evaluate such a decentralized annotation service.