Enabling Social Information Exchange via Dynamically Robust Annotations

Abstract

With the emergence of new web paradigms, we currently see a tremendous increase in interest in different applications of the social web. However, this rising interest in social platforms has also led to the rise of numerous new challenges, especially issues like fake-news, filter-bubble, and web-page-decay. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel DOM-oriented edit distance anchoring approach that enables stable tracking of ephemeral web content. We argue that such a stable anchoring approach could indeed foster the creation of a browser-based crowdsourcing information system that could help us tackle rising issues on the web. Building on this hypothesis, we present a new web annotation tool called Tippanee, that is designed around the proposed anchoring approach; and provides its users with a collaborative environment where web users could help in improving the quality of textual content on the web by annotating, archiving, linking, sharing and semantically describing content on-the-fly.