Sharing/discovering/visualizing annotations in Ask.ThePund.it

= Introducing Ask =

Ask is a web platform for sharing annotations and notebooks created with Pundit. While Pundit’s role is that of enabling people to annotate web pages of interest, Ask is where such annotations, once made public, can then be searched and explored. Additionally, in Ask you find a MyAsk tab: it offers single users a view of their personal (public or private) notebooks.

Reusing, visualizing and making intelligent use of the knowledge created via annotations is probably the most important task for scholars and poses technical and design challenges on the developers side. As a first step in this direction, we incorporated into Ask a few specialized visualization tools to graph annotations in a timeline or in a edgemap graph.

The following exercises will guide you through Ask and will help us to collect feedback and new ideas from the WAB community.

= Audience =

This tutorial is targetd to end users, mainly scholars who want to have an impression of the collaborative features (sharing, discovering annotations) that we implemented in the DM2E tools and that exemplify the possibilities created by Semantic Web technologies for working in a digital online environment. Although this is not a technical tutorial, it is also meant for persons from institutions or private companies that might want to aggregate communities of user and leverage data produced by annotations.

= Objective =

The proposed assignments, which include short tasks that can be performed with Ask (http://ask.thepund.it), will teach the user how to explore annotations made with Pundit in a social environment. Topics covered are: searching notebooks, browsing annotations, personal notebook management, aggregation of multiple notebooks as a semantic graph, and facets driven analysis of annotations. Assignment 4 deals with extending the platform with domain specific, vertical applications, mostly to visualize the outcome of the annotation process. The assignment provides a practical demonstration of possible interactive visualizations, hopefully encouraging novel extensions to the open tools addressed here.

= Description =

Assignment 1 - Search for public notebooks
1. Go to http://ask.thepund.it and wait for the page to load. Public notebooks in the platform will be progressively shown along with some simple statistics such as the number of annotations, authors and notebooks.



2. You can search and sort notebooks by date, author name and title. Try searching for the name of one of your colleagues participating the experiment. Click on the notebook to open it in a new tab. Afterwards, go back to the “Notebooks” tab to start a new search and look for all the notebooks made within the WAB experiment, by simply typing “WAB” in the search box. Open 2 or 3 notebooks of your choice by clicking on them.



3. Explore a single notebook. Choose one of the notebooks you have just opened and click on the respective tab to see all the annotations in the notebook. Try to perform the following actions:

(a) Expand one annotation to see its details. (b) Figure out what triple is in the annotation and its meaning (c) Figure out which predicate was used in the annotation (d) Figure out the object of the triples in one annotation (e) Find an annotation (in one of the notebooks) that has as object an element from the WAB:Subjects vocabulary (f) Take a look at the annotation in context (in the web page where it was created)

4. Respond to an annotation. When you click “See the annotation” in Ask, a new browser tab will open and the annotation will be opened in Pundit, as shown in the following picture.



By clicking the small yellow button close to the text (e.g. the orange text in the figure), you can use the the functionalities you know from the first round of assignments (comments, tags, triple composer) to add your contribution. For example, you could attach a comment to the orange text or add a triple to link to a related entry in the WAB:Subjects vocabulary.

Try to follow these steps to make a new contribution:

(a) Use Ask to find an annotation of interest (b) Go to the annotation and open in in Pundit (c) Create a new annotation on the same text fragment bringing some new explicit knowledge.

Assignment 2 - My Ask
Go to the “My Ask” tab. To login you can use the same credentials you use in Pundit (e.g. Google account).



In this tab you should see all your notebooks. Try to perform the following actions:

Note: the current notebook cannot be deleted. In order to perform this action you first have to reset your current notebook to the one named “WAB...” and then delete the notebook named “WAB 2”
 * 1) Rename a notebook (please do not remove the “WAB” tag from your notebook!)
 * 2) Create a new notebook and give it a name that starts with “WAB 2”
 * 3) Using the “wheel” button, change visibility to the “WAB 2...” notebook. Then switch back to public.
 * 4) Go to a page of the Brown Book and open it in Pundit. Now use the “notebook manager” to set the newly created notebook as the “current” one.
 * 5) Create a couple of sample annotations on the page.
 * 6) Go back to Ask and find your new annotations
 * 7) Delete the notebook named “WAB 2…”

Assignment 3 - Facets
Faceted search (or browsing) is a common paradigm for exploring data. In Ask we are experimenting with it to enable a user to query the system and to deeply explore the structured data (triples) that come from a number of notebooks. Before performing this assignment, ensure you have a number of “WAB” notebooks opened (at least 3), with a certain number of annotations in them.

In Ask, click on the “Facet” button on the top right. The faceted browser will open in a new tab in Ask (see the following picture). Available facets are shown in the left bar.



Example usage: Setting the “Author” facet by clicking on a author name removes all the rows from the result table except those where the author is the chosen one. Setting the “Predicate” facet to “discusses”, shows annotations where such a predicate has been used in a triple.

Try to perform the following actions:


 * 1) Find all the annotations that use a specified predicate and are authored by a specified person.
 * 2) Find all the annotations that have a specified text passage as the subject and use a specified predicate.
 * 3) Open the annotation in Pundit by clicking the “See Annotation” link in the corresponding row of the results table.
 * 4) Add a new contribution to “respond” to the annotation (as done in the previous assignment).

Assignment 4 - Vertical visualizations
This last assignment has the goal of guiding you through two simple examples of specialized visualizations of notebooks. Please take note of any ideas that might come to your mind for improving the examples or possibly adapting them to your domain/field of interest.

Note: the demonstrative visualization applications was built using open-source tools and are not yet in a stable state. Things can break.

Simple timeline

 * 1) Go to http://ask.thepund.it and search for a notebook named “Ancona”.
 * 2) Open the notebook and have a look at the annotations and the information they encompass.
 * 3) Scroll down the page and click on the green “Interactive Timeline” button. A new page will open where the very same annotations are shown in a timeline.
 * 4) Browse the timeline annotation by annotation and click the “Go to annotated page” link to show an annotation in its context.

Note: this is possible thanks to the “date” triples that are present in the annotations (you can view them in Ask).

Edge Map

 * 1) Go to http://ask.thepund.it and search for the notebook named “romeo”.
 * 2) Open the notebook and have a look at the annotations.
 * 3) Scroll down the page and click on the green “Edgemap influence graph” button. A new page will open showing a graph where nodes are authors of the annotated texts. The arrows connecting them have been created on the basis of citations annotated with Pundit.
 * 4) Click on one of the bubbles to focus on a philosopher. A number of bubbles connected to the selected philosopher will be highlighted.
 * 5) Drag the mouse pointer over on one of those bubbles: a grey box should appear at the bottom right of the page. It shows the annotations that generated this connection.
 * 6) Click on the “Go to annotated web page” to show the annotations in context with Pundit.

Note: this is possible thanks to the “cites” and “has author” predicates that were used in the annotations (see them in Ask).