Semantic Annotation
SWickyNotes is an open-source desktop application for semantically annotating web pages and digital libraries. It bases on Semantic Web standards to allow annotations to be more than simple textual “sticky notes”: they can contain semantically structured data that can be later used to meaningfully browse the annotated contents. This is why we call them “SWicky Notes” (Semantic Web Sticky Notes).
In short, with SWickyNotes you can:
- Attach simple textual comments to a web page;
- Create semanticaly structured knowledge within your notes, using precise relations and terms from one or more vocabularies (ontologies). For example you can say that a “page A has been written by Bob”, “page A defines the concept of Freedom”, or that “page A contradicts/agrees with page B”;
- Do both these things, but referring to single words, sentences or images in a web pages;
- Collect all your notes into a digital notebook and share it on the World Wide Web;
- Import notebooks shared by your friend or collegues;
- Browse the web on the basis of the semantic relations created by you or by your friends/collegues. The strucured knowledge contained in the swicky notes form a conceptual network, a graph that you can visualize and navigate in different ways.
SWickyNotes is based on the DBin RCP, and can be customized, both from a UI and from a functional viewpoint, to meet the needs of a given user community. The first customization is called Philospace and has been developed within the Discovery EU project for “semantically enriching” the content of the Philosource federation (a set of digital libraries based on the Talia framework).
For further info please visit http://swickynotes.org.
If you want to try out the tool download SWickyNotes and take a look at the user guide to quickly understand the basics.
HOW DOES SWICKYNOTES LOOK LIKE?
When you browse a web page, the swicky notes involving it are shown on the right along with their author, creation date and structured information/relation they include. The browser positions a button in the web page where a particular piece of text (or image) has swicky notes attached.
By clicking on one of such buttons, the respective page fragment is shown in a highlight box. You can visualize the structured knowledge (composed by all the swickynotes) as a graph or as a tree, and use them as an intuitive way of browsing web pages and ontology entities on the basis of the semantic relations that connects them.
Adding a swicky note is easy. You have to select what you want to annotate in the web page and then use the graphical wizard to edit both textual and structured content. Each structurd information you edit is composed by a relation (which you can choose from a drop down) and a target. Suppose you want to say that a sentence mentions Nietzsche. You first select the sentence and click “add note”. Then you choose the relation “mentions” from the drop down. Now you only hve to specify the object (or target) or your relation: you can choose it from the drop down (as for the relations) or you can use the ontology view (which you see on the right). Such a view shows all the entities known by SWickyNotes at the moment, hierarchically grouped by type. In this case you go under Persons and dragn-and-drop the item called Nietzsche.
