Assoc Prof. Paolo Bottoni paid a visit to the Institute of Software (ISCAS) at the invitation of Beijing Key Lab of Human-Computer Interactionon April. 18th, 2013.

Paolo Bottoni is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Sapienza University and is interested in formal methods for visual languages and interactive systems, and in multimedia applications for digital annotation and for cultural heritage. Author of 160 publications, he has participated in national projects, where he has also acted as responsible of the Sapienza unit in two occasions, and in a European networks of excellence and in two research mobility projects, in one of them acting as reference for the Sapienza unit. He serves as a member of numerous international program committees, as member of the steering committee of three series of international conferences, and has been editor of special issues of international journals. He is member of the Editorial Board of two international journals. He has also promoted two series of workshops on topics related to modelling and development of languages in the domain of software engineering and Human Computer Interaction.

Assoc Prof. Paolo Bottoni delivered a report at ISCAS during his visit. The title of this report was“Document and model annotation: a formal view and a system for Web annotation”.

Annotation is becoming a ubiquitous concept in computer science, referring both to end-user interactive activities on generic content and to the structured use of conventional tags to be processed by automatic tools. In the interactive field, notably when browsing Web documents, annotation is a way to enrich a document with additional, user-generated content, without corrupting the original version. In the modelling field, annotations facilitate “separation of concerns", while assisting in tracing the origin of a specification.

Assoc Prof. Paolo Bottoni said that in general, we view the annotation process as the construction of an additional structure, parallel to that of an original document, on top of which personalised contents can be added with reference to the original ones, Hence, annotations become first-class elements, giving rise to new documents, which can be the subject of additional annotations. In the modelling field, this amounts to the possibility of having orthogonal ways of annotating a specification, as well as of constraining the validity of an annotation to a more refined context. In the document interaction field, this allows users to establish collaborative threads of discussion, focused on the original annotated content. In his talk, he present some formal aspects of the notion of annotation in the two fields, and discuss some features of a system for annotation of Web-based content realised at the Department of Computer Science of the Sapienza, supporting threads of annotations and mechanisms for constructing and managing groups of users with common interests.

The audience had a heated discussion with Assoc Prof. Paolo Bottoni in the end of the report.