Annotea Ubimarks in Mozilla/Firefox

1 Introduction

Annotea Ubimarks is part of Annotea social bookmarks and topics work in Mozilla. It lets any user familiar with the common bookmark user interface metaphora to create metadata for Semantic Web while the complexities of the Semantic Web are hidden from the users. It also offers users better means to share and combine bookmark data and bookmark categories, or topics from several locations or with other metadata. Topics in Annotea can be very simple tags or they can form hierarchies.

New bookmarks and topics can be added to, deleted from, and updated at the bookmark files. These files can be kept local or published on the Web in which case FTP or WebDAV HTTP PUT can be used for updates.

Several local or global bookmark files can be selected to be queried at the same time. For instance, a user can subcribe to combine a file can contains a topic hierarchy that a group has agreed to use in their co-operation and other user's published bookmark files to always see the current situation of that group's bookmarks.

The created bookmark data (see sample bookmark files) can be used for many other applications, for instance, to help users find related information, to organize search results, to create profiles for certain purposes.

Note: By default Ubimarks uses automatically generated UUID URI's to identify bookmarks and topics. Users can configure to use other types of URIs in Configuration/Ids tab.

Annotea Ubimarks is a prototype under development and many things may change. It is made available early as part of opening up Annotea development.

2 Try this out

Files for Annotea Ubimarks are stored under CVS on sourceforge.net site.

2.1 Install Annotea ubimarks

If you want to try this out:

1. Load Annotea ubimarks to you Mozilla/Firefox browser from the sourceforge.net or addons.mozilla.org links below.
   The current browsers do user profile installation by default.
2. If installation was successful start Mozilla/Firefox again to see the new Ubimarks toolbar.

Current versions (detailed version info):

• ubimarks-0_6_2.xpi (addons pending for review, sourceforge)
  Improved user interface for selecting bookmark stores.

  Corrected a load/refresh bug when changing bookmark store.

• ubimarks-0_6_1.xpi (addons, sourceforge )
  Replaces version 0.6.0.

  Changed RDF datastore handling so that mozilla required (sometimes wrong) mime types are not a problem when using WebDAV.

  Can now directly edit HTTP files in my internet service with Annotea Ubimarks via WebDAV.

  Corrected bug related to combining facet selections.

  Internally datastores now utilize XPCOM packages, which was a big change.

2.2 Installation packaging

Detailed information about the installation types and installed files and directories.

3 What to see

When you open Mozilla with ubimarks, you can see the Ubimarks toolbar (see Figure 3.1). You can also see if the currently selected page has bookmarks by looking the pagemark icons:

• icon for pagemarks ()
• icon for no pagemarks ()

You can click the pagemark icon to see list of the bookmarks on the page in a pagemark view. From there you can click a bookmark and open a bookmark view that shows the properties of a bookmark including the topics it belongs to. Topics can be clicked to see the topic properties in a topic view. And related links can be clicked to follow them for further information.

You can also select to see the whole bookmark hierarchy. Selecting a bookmark in the hierarchy shows the recalled page and clicking the icon shows the bookmark properties.

The bookmarks and topics can be searched by using the title and description text. The bookmarks can also be queried in a faceted view that the users can defined dynamically themselves.

It is possible to configure the author information including a foaf person URI (e.g. http://www.annotea.org/marja#marja), the default topics, and the used the datasources in the configure view.

4 Some findings and comments

Some findings and comments related to Mozilla/Firefox development.

5 Discussion list

For discussions use public-annotea-dev list located @w3.org.

References

Koivunen, M. (2004) Annotea shared bookmarks: Semantic Web at your fingertips. ISWC 2004 demo.

Koivunen, M. (2004) Annotea shared bookmarks: Connecting lifescience research. W3C lifescience workshop October 2004.