Annotations as sticky notes
I get the sense that most people think of annotations as "sticky notes" that someone puts on data. In other words, the data is owned by somebody, and anyone who isn't the owner gets to make comments, which the owner is free to use or ignore as they see fit. With this model, the focus is on how the owner deals with the annotations, and how they manage the fact that their data may have changed since the annotations were made.
This model has limitations. For a start, it privileges the "owner", and puts annotators at their mercy. For example, I posted an issue regarding a record in the Museum of Comparative Zoology Herpetology database (see https://github.com/mcz-vertnet/mcz-subset-for-vertnet/issues/1). VertNet has adopted GitHub to manage annotations of collection data, which is nice, but it only works if there's someone at the other end ready to engage with people like me who are making annotations. I suspect this is mostly not going to be the case, so why would I bother annotating the data? Yes, I know that VertNet has only just set this up, but that's missing the point. Supporting this model requires customer support, and who has the resources for that? If I don't get the sense that someone is going to deal with my annotation, why bother?
So, the issues here are that the owner gets all the rights, the annotators have none, and in practice the owners might not be in a position to make use of the annotations anyway.
Wikis
OK, if the owner/annotator model doesn't seem attractive, what about wikis? Let's put the data on a wiki and let folks edit it, that'll work, right? There's a lot to be said in favour of wikis, but there's a disadvantage to the basic wiki model. On a wiki, there is one page for an item, and everyone gets to edit that same page. The hope is that a consensus will emerge, but if it doesn't then you get edit wars (e.g., When taxonomists wage war in Wikipedia). If you've made an edit, or put your data on a wiki, anyone can overwrite it. Sure, you can roll back to an earlier version, but so can anyone else.
Wikis bring tools for community editing, but overturn ownership completely, so the data owner, or indeed any individual annotator has no control over what happens to their contributions. Why would an expert contribute if someone else can undo all their hard work?
Social data
So, if sticky notes and wikis aren't the solution, what is? I've been looking at Fluidinfo lately. There's an interview here, and a book here. The company has gone quiet lately (apparently focussing on enterprise customers), but what matters here is the underlying idea, namely "social data".
Fluidinfo's model is that it is a database of objects (representing things or concepts), and anyone can add data to those objects (they are "openly writable"). The key is that every tag is linked to the user, and by default you can only add, edit, or delete your own tags. This means that if a data provider adds, say a bibliographic reference to the database, I can edit it by adding tags, but I can't edit the data provider's tags. To make this a bit more concrete, suppose we have a record for the article with the DOI 10.1163/187631293X00262. We can represent the metadata from CrossRef like this:
{
"_id": "10.1163/187631293X00262",
"crossref/doi" : "10.1163/187631293X00262",
"crossref/title" : "A taxonomic review of the pondskater...",
"crossref/journal" : "Insect Systematics & Evolution",
"crossref/issn" : [ "1399-560X", "1876-312X"]
}
Note the use of the namespace "crossref" in the tags. This is data that, notionally, CrossRef "owns" and can edit, and nobody else. Now, as I've discussed earlier (Orwellian metadata: making journals disappear) some publishers have an annoying habit of retrospectively renaming journals. This article was published in Entomologica Scandinavica, which has since been renamed Insect Systematics & Evolution, and CrossRef gives the latter as the journal name for this article. But most citations to the article will use the old journal name. Under the social data model, I can add this information (in bold):
{
"_id": "10.1163/187631293X00262",
"crossref/doi" : "10.1163/187631293X00262",
"crossref/title" : "A taxonomic review of the pondskater...",
"crossref/journal" : "Insect Systematics & Evolution",
"crossref/issn" : ["1399-560X", "1876-312X"],
"rdmpage/journal" : "Entomologica Scandinavica","rdmpage/issn" : ["0013-8711" ]
}
My tags have the namespace "rdmpage", so they are "mine". I haven't overwritten the "crossref" tags. Somebody else could add their own tags, and of course, CrossRef could update their tags if they wish. We can all edit this object, we don't need permission to do so, and we can rest assured that our own edits won't be overwritten by somebody else.
This model can be quite liberating. If you are a data provider/owner, you don't have to worry about people trampling over your data, because you (and any users of your data) can simply ignore tags not in your namespace ("ignore those rdmpage' tags, that Rod Page chap is clearly a nutter"). Annotators are freed from their reliance on data providers doing anything with the annotations they created. I don't care whether CrossRef decides to revert the journal name Insect Systematics & Evolution to Entomologica Scandinavica for earlier article (or not), I can just use the "rdmpage/journal" (if it exists) to get what I think is the appropriate journal name. My annotations are immediately usable. Because everyone gets to edit in their own namespace, we don't need to form a consensus, so we don't need the version control feature of wikis to enable roll backs, there are no more edit wars (almost).
Implementation
A key feature of the Fluidinfo social data model is that the data is stored in a single, globally accessible place. Hence we need a global annotation store. Fluidinfo itself doesn't seem to have a publicly accessible database, I guess in part because managing one is a major undertaking (think Freebase). Despite Nicholas Tollervey's post (FluidDB is not CouchDB (and FluidDB's secret sauce)), I think CouchDB is exactly the way I'd want to implement this (it's here, it works, and it scales). The "secret sauce" is essentially application logic (every key has a namespace corresponding to a given user).
The more I think about this model the more I like it. It could greatly simplify the task of annotating biodiversity data, and avoid what I fear are going to be the twin dead ends of sticky note annotation and wikis.
