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, corrections 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 annotate, the extent of collaboration and sharing they allow and the communities which they serve. However within many applications, there is a need to restrict access to the annotations to a particular group of trusted users 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 and XACML to identify and authenticate users and restrict their access to annotations stored on an Annotea server.