Notate Beta Testing

Notate is a web-based tool for annotating and tagging words and phrases within documents. It creates a searchable index of all the annotations you make and displays the annotations against the text they refer to when you revisit a site. Annotations can be kept private or can be shared within a group such as a lab or journal club.

This is an informal beta test program: please use the system it and let us know what you like, what you don't like, any problems you encounter. We're particularly interested in hearing any suggestions you have for improving it.

Notate currently only works on the browsers: Firefox [Windows / Mac / Linux] and Internet Explorer 6 [Windows]. We plan to add support for Safari [Mac] later.

Getting started using Notate

Click the 'notate' icon in the top right, and you will be able to set up an account to store your private notes (it takes a few seconds). Once you have an account, clicking the Notate icon will popup a notebox which you can use for adding notes on the page and attaching them to words or phrases in the text.

When you register, you will be given two buttons which you can add to the browser's favorites/bookmarks bar - these let you annotate any website. One button takes a snapshot of the site you're viewing, and the other takes you to your index of notes. The user guide explains the main features of the notepad.

There are some Flash animations to introduce the features:

Animation 1: Getting started - creating an account and adding a note

Animation 2: How to use the 'Snapshot' button to annotate any website.

Animation 3: Creating a group for discussing and sharing notes.

Notate for webmasters:

Adding annotation capabilities to your own website is very straightforward. This will lets people interact with your on-line content in much the same ways as they might otherwise use printed copies. An added bonus is that your users can also help build up a shared index of your site as they attach public annotations to particular terms of interest.

Things to try

Once the notepad is showing, you can:

• Select a word on the page; type a note; save. The note should move to just over the word.
• Select a word, but instead of a note, type a tag in the space below the note area and save.
• As above, but now you can tag something just by clicking the tag in the list.
• Double-click on a note and click "edit" or "reply" to extend the note.
• Click the link inside the note. This takes you to the server where you can view your notes, search by tags, etc etc.
• Change the note display style between overlaid, embedded and inlined using the row of buttons above the text area.
• Change the colors of individual notes to color-code their content.

On the server, you can:

• Create a new group (on the "settings" page) and use the link to send an email authorizing someone else to join your group.
• Go to some other site and snapshot it (after adding the "snap" button to your browser, as explained on the server "settings" page). Then you can annotate the snapshot.
• Click the top-right icon on the server to start a mini-notepad to add standalone notes to the server.
• Search the index for annotated terms (after you've actually got some annotations).

Some questions and answers

• Can you add notes to any website?
  
  The snapshot tool lets you annotate a cached copy of any website - it works with most sites but does not yet work with sites using multiple frames (but you can view a single frame, and annotate that).
• How about dynamically generated sites (e.g. the output of a database query)?
  
  These should work fine - the snapshot is based on what is displayed in the browser, not on the URL link, so the results of database queries can be annotated.
• Can you annotate PDF versions of papers or MS Word files?
  
  Not yet - Notate only works with HTML web pages. You can save MS Word files as html and annotate them on an intra / internet. You can also convert PDF to HTML and annotate it (e.g. Google caches html versions of PDFs), but the result isn't perfect. Please let us know if adding PDF and DOC support would make Notate much more useful for you.
• How does Notate compare to social bookmarking / reference management sites like del.icio.us, connotea, citeulike?
  
  There are a number of bookmarking / reference management websites which let you share bookmarks / references and add tags and comments. Notate is different as it focusses on bookmarking and annotating the words and phrases mentioned within the text, rather than the entire web page / paper (although you can use Notate as an advanced version of web page bookmarks as well). Notate also defaults to keeping notes private, or sharing comments within a group of trusted people (but you can make selected notes public) - the bookmarking sites focus on making everything public.
• Is Notate free to use?
  
  The beta is completely free to use. Commercial content providers wishing to add Notate to their websites will be able to obtain a license from us, and we expect that they will then provide the Notate features as a free service to their readers, in order to make their site more attractive and encourage more return visits. Please contact us if you're interested in adding Notate to your site, and see the page for webmasters for technical details on how to do it.
• I have another burning question which isn't answered here - what should I do?
  
  Please contact us and we'll try and answer.

About Textensor Notate

The idea for Notate grew out of the problem that although the scientific literature is increasingly available online, it is almost completely unindexed and only minimally tagged. Reference citations take you to the top of a paper that may be many pages long, instead of the actual place where the quoted statement is made. We ought to be able to do better than this given the potential of modern web browsers to offer a more interactive experience, and let people make more use from the huge volume of papers and other documents on the web.

The annotation system changes this by allowing tagging and annotation of single words and phrases within on-line material. Every annotated term is indexed and cross referenced with any tags that are attached.

Although its origins are in the drive to make better use of on-line scientific literature, the system works equally well for many other forms of content used in web-based research. The ability to tag notes and add replies in-situ can help cut down on the use of email for group discussions.

About Textensor

Textensor Limited was formed in Edinburgh in 2005 by scientific researchers and software engineers Fred Howell and Robert Cannon. It develops tools to improve access to information by facilitating the creation of structured content alongside and within written text. We believe that authoring structured content should be as easy if not easier than writing text, and that the best people to create such content are the authors themselves.