An annotation tool for web browsers and its applications to information retrieval

Abstract

With bookmark programs, current Web browsers provide a limited support to personalize the Web. We present a new Web annotation tool which uses the Document Object Model Level 2 and Dynamic HTML to deliver a system where speed and privacy are important issues. We report on several experiments showing how annotations improve document access and retrieval by providing user-directed document summaries. Preliminary results also show that annotations can be used to produce user-directed document clustering and classification. Introduction Current Web browsers provide a limited support to personalize the Web, namely bookmarks. In two recent surveys, users report that the use of bookmarks is among the three main problems they have when using the Internet (Abrams, 1998 ; Cockburn, 1999). We see several problems when using bookmarks : The number of bookmarks grows linearly with time (Abrams, 1998) and it becomes a real challenge for many users to organize this amount of data By storing the...