iAnnotate: Exploring Multi-User Ink Annotation in Web Browsers

We present iAnnotate, a tool that provides multi-user digital ink annotation on standard web pages within a commercial browser. The annotation can be saved, retrieved and shared with others via a URL. In addition multiple users’ annotations can be displayed on the same page. We describe our design goals and the technical challenges. While realizing annotation on web documents is difficult because of the dynamic nature of the documents and the security constraints of web browsers, our user evaluation suggests that fully realized digital ink annotation tools would be very valuable.