Implementing a Secure Annotation Service

Annotation systems enable “value-adding” to digital resources by the attachment of additional data in the form of comments, explanations, references, reviews and other types of external, subjective remarks. They facilitate group discourse and capture collective intelligence by enabling communities to attach and share their views on particular data and documents accessible over the Web. Annotation systems vary greatly with regard to the types of content they can annotate, the extent of collaboration and sharing they allow and the communities which they serve. However many applications share the need to authenticate the source of annotations and restrict access to them – in order to protect intellectual property rights or personal privacy. This paper describes a secure, open source annotation system that we have developed that uses Shibboleth [1] and XACML [2] to identify and authenticate users and restrict access to annotations stored on an Annotea [3] server.