Open Repositories 2.0: Harvesting Community Annotations to Enhance Discovery services

Over the past few years, collaborative social tagging and annotation systems that involve communities of users creating and sharing their own metadata, have exploded on the Internet. Examples of such systems include: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Connotea, YouTube, LastFm. Such systems are exemplary of the Web 2.0 phenomena because they use the Internet to harness collective intelligence. Although there are issues associated with the quality of the metadata generated by online communities, there are also significant advantages including the cost benefits of leveraging community effort to generate metadata and enhanced search and discovery services that result from richer, more relevant metadata and rankings of resources. In this paper we describe the HarvANA (Harvesting and Aggregating Networked Annotations) system that we are developing at the University of Queensland. The objective of HarvANA is to develop an efficient streamlined system (that is based on open standards and comprises a set of open source services) that can leverage the explosion of community annotation/tagging systems and exploit the resulting metadata to improve discovery and reasoning across open repositories.