Developing Web Interfaces for Content Annotation
The ability to reuse content is a common justification for using a content management system. Publishers and managers want the power to amass a repository of content items that they can reassemble in a variety of document structures and formats. While accounting for this diversity of outputs, they also want to ensure that content consumers (both human and automated) have consistent tools for searching, navigating and browsing all types of content.
Proper annotation is critical for providing this consistency. Unfortunately, it is often challenging to ensure that non-technical managers and authors annotate content adequately. They tend to be most comfortable working with unstructured documents in desktop applications, and put off by interfaces that require entry of complex metadata in addition to their web pages and documents.
This session presents some user interface designs (in the context of a working demo system) that aim to make the task of content annotation as simple and enjoyable as possible for both the editors who define the annotation scheme as well as the authors who must perform the actual task of annotation.
The first part of the session will present an interface for definining an annotation scheme. Content managers should be able to easily define taxonomies consisting of either flat lists or hierarchies of categories. For example, a Color taxonomy might define a simple list of possible color values, whereas a Geography taxonomy might be organized into several levels of increasingly smaller regions.
Once defined, managers should be able to leverage these taxonomies to capture consistent annotation data during the authoring process. They should be able to define simple rules such as "Categorize all content in the World News section of the site by Geography", which direct the system to automatically generate the form fields with appropriately constrained values for authors to complete.
The second part of the session will present some designs (in the context of the same working demo system) for simplifying the annotation process from an authoring standpoint. These designs aim to be as direct and efficient as possible, and to help authors understand the value of proper annotation.
Karl Goldstein