Scoping Definitions

• Annotation: Annotations are a key documentary practice in scholarship, general reading, and the markup of web-based resources more generally. An annotation, in the simplest sense, is a relation drawn between a resource target and body.

1. Target: The resource being annotated- essentially what is being annotated;
2. Body: The content of the annotation - essentially what the annotation expresses about the target.

From W3C - "An annotation is considered to be a set of connected resources, typically including a body and target, and conveys that the body is related to the target. The exact nature of this relationship changes according to the intention of the annotation, but the body is most frequently somehow "about" the target."

• Anchor "a data structure feature that locates the annotation in some part of the digital object" - this is distinct from a target in the sense that it operationalizes or puts the target into a web-space where particular parts of digital objects (web pages, digital images, etc) can be selected for annotation.

A major challenge in web annotation is expressing or typing how or why a body is related to a target. The W3C model for example provides a set of annotator "motivations" but these are recognized as both incomplete, and insufficient for capturing intentions of web annotation creators (Jett et al 2016).