Annotate once, appear anywhere: collective foraging for snippets of interest using paragraph fingerprinting

Abstract

A common practice in work groups is to share links to interesting web pages. Moreover, passages in these web pages are often cut-and-pasted, and used in various other contexts. In this paper we report how we explore the idea of paragraph fingerprinting to achieve the goal of annotate once, appear anywhere in a social annotation system called SparTag.us. This work was motivated by the prominence of redundant contents with different URLs on the Web and shared documents that are read and re-read within enterprises. Our technique attaches users annotations to the contents of paragraphs, enabling annotations to move along with the paragraphs within dynamic live pages and travel across the page boundary to other pages as long as the paragraph contents remain intact. We also describe how we use paragraph fingerprinting to facilitate the social sharing of information nuggets among our users.