Our development of 4A Framework started on December of 2010. It is a novel knowledge system that builds on the popularity of social tagging and collaboration systems as well as on the idea of Annotations Anywhere, Annotations Anytime" (hence 4A). You can read more about it in papers and presentations below.
The core of Framework is a new XML format of annotation (in later version replaced with standard Open Annotation format and used only partially as an extension), protocol for communication between clients and server and concept of user interface to achieve very fast and user friendly way to create structured annotations, which can be linked or exported to ontology, or used only for information extraction.
For verification of concept we are developping a server and clients, which are extensions or plugins for Web browsers and JavaScript based WYSIWYG editors (used in many of content management systems). All is still under development, but alpha versions of system components on this page has almost all major parts implemented and tested.
In 2014 we created version 2 of the framework and new version of the server and client for verification.
If you are interested, you can contact us on an e-mail dytrych@fit.vutbr.cz. We can create account on public available annotation server for you, show you clients under development (not available here, because is not tested at all and not usable - core functionality is not fully implemented) and so on.
If you want to test our solution locally, you can install NetBeans 7.0 to 7.3 with GlassFish server 3.x, MySQL database server (database name and settings is in sun-resources.xml, data files are in resources directory), download project and set up GlassFish accordingly to resources/readme.txt in project directory. After you turn up the server, you can download and use client. For using of Firefox extension it's highly recommended to add our server knot.fit.vutbr.cz to your Browser - Tools - Preferences - Security - Allowed Sites - Software installation, install our certificate (can be downloaded below) and use an automatic updates of our extension.
More informations about server can be found in Directions for use of 4A Annotation Server
