A historical and contemporary study on annotations to derive key features for systems design

This paper provides a comprehensive study on annotations by defining their contours and complexity. This work adds a new complementary approach to the usual case and user studies, and also investigates history in order to benefit from previous knowledge and our cultural heritage. This study emphasizes an aspect which has never previously been taken into account: the temporal dimension involved in annotations. Moreover, it discusses both the notion of hypertext between documents and annotations and the idea of annotations as context for documents. The study gives the necessary historical and cultural background to derive a set of key features of annotations that must be taken into account when designing systems that have to support the management of digital annotations on digital contents.