A browser extension to read and write annotations on any webpage

RubenVerborgh commented 2 years ago

Pitch

I go to a random webpage and BAM 💥 I see the comments that my friends have left on there. I can add comments too, and decide who can see them. Because they are just stored in my Solid Pod.

Desired solution

Basically

SELECT * FROM a_trusted_set_of_pods WHERE {
   ?a a ex:Annotation;
      ex:target <current_webpage_url>.
}

in which a_trusted_set_of_pods can be a list of my FOAF friends, but also take comments from one or more trusted comment hubs.

Acceptance criteria

I install a browser extension
I log in to the browser extension
I go to a random webpage
I can add an annotation to a specific piece of text
Chantelle does the same steps and she sees my annotation; I see hers.

Pointers

https://dokie.li/ (in particular the extension)
The researcher viewer from the Mellon project

pheyvaer commented 2 years ago

Considering that dokieli says

In order to edit articles in the browser and save directly to server storage, as well as grant access to collaborators to edit, dokieli works against Solid Protocol and Linked Data Platform servers.

What does this challenge add?

jeswr commented 2 years ago

What does this challenge add?

Dokeli lets you edit articles that you or your collaborators own; and the article is stored in your POD. If I understand correctly in this challenge you should be able to annotate and comment on any webpage on the internet.

phochste commented 2 years ago

Annotating the web has a long history. There have been and still are many solutions and plugins to feed these solutions. Robert Sanderson created the Web Annotation data model to express annotations in RDF. Javascript libraries such as Annotator can create annotation based on the DOM model of a webpage (with plugins to annotate also other multimedia formats). Applications such as Hypothes.is , Annotation Studio and others use this tool (and the Web Annotation specification I assume) already in their products. Certainly the former has quite a large user base.

The way annotations are written has with Web Annotation an interoperable spec, but as far as I know the storage of the annotations rely on centralised solutions (at least in spirit). Hyptothes.is provides the source code to run an annotation server, but with a not-standardised Hypothesis API.

The real challenge it to bring web annotations into Solid-land. Hopefully this can be done by extending current solutions or making use of their tools.

pheyvaer commented 2 years ago

@jeswr The website says "Annotate, reply to and share articles. Let your readers choose where to store their annotations." Here is a video about that https://dokie.li/#annotate and there the user logs in with their WebID and so on.

phochste commented 2 years ago

@pheyvaer dokieli has the spirit to be able to personal annotate any website and store the results in a Solid pod (I can't see the annotations of others).

You need the Chrome plugin version to annotate webpages that don't have injected the dokieli javascript. The plugin version I didn't get to work (there are authentication issues).

There is an option to extend dokieli with social annotation features. There is also an option to extend the 'Annotator' library with Solid features (so that any annotation tool can do the Solid way).

RubenVerborgh commented 2 years ago

What does this challenge add?

Also the custom view, that I see annotations that are relevant/trusted for me.

pheyvaer commented 2 years ago

@RubenVerborgh Considering we had some issues before with authentication in browser plugin, would it be ok that we create another challenge where all annotations are public so that authentication is not needed. This new challenge is then a subchallenge of this one.

phochste commented 2 years ago

@RubenVerborgh we had an internal discussion about this challenge. The most interesting case for us it the way how annotations (in whatever way that are generated) can be shared and made visible via a plugin/app/app+plugin to users visiting a website. This is very much inline with the Collector and Scholarly Browser from the Mellon Project. How annotations are being generated could be a separate issue. We would like to work backwards and maybe need the generation of annotations as a separate (or a sub) challenge.

RubenVerborgh commented 2 years ago

Considering we had some issues before with authentication in browser plugin, would it be ok that we create another challenge where all annotations are public so that authentication is not needed.

Yes; that is fine.

The most interesting case for us it the way how annotations (in whatever way that are generated) can be shared and made visible via a plugin/app/app+plugin to users visiting a website. This is very much inline with the Collector and Scholarly Browser from the Mellon Project. How annotations are being generated could be a separate issue. We would like to work backwards and maybe need the generation of annotations as a separate (or a sub) challenge.

Perfect; please go ahead!

RubenVerborgh commented 2 years ago

(Maybe this challenge could be transformed into a scenario then.)

pheyvaer commented 2 years ago

I made challenge https://github.com/SolidLabResearch/Challenges/issues/66 and will turn this challenge into a scenario.

SolidLabResearch / Challenges