OATS: The Open Annotation and Tagging System

This paper presents the Open Annotation and Tagging System (OATS) which draws on previous work in social navigation support, web annotations systems, collaborative tagging and educational metadata. The OATS system augments the text highlighting metaphor by providing a “collaborative tagging” and annotation interface which enables social navigation support. These tools aim to help learners in learning managements systems to better organize and navigate content. While there are many examples of web annotation systems, none provide a combination of annotations, tagging, and value-added functionality, which are decoupled from the system in which they are used, through a web service interface. This proof-ofconcept system identifies a relatively simple method for developing value-added functionality that can be more easily incorporated in a wide range of systems used in e-learning.