Digital Open Annotation with Hypothesis: Supplying the Missing Capability of the Web

Hypothesis is an open-source technology developed by a non-profit organization that enables a conversation across all the content on the Web, a rich and interconnected exchange that goes well beyond experiments with past commenting tools. The publication of annotation as a Web standard by the World Wide Web Consortium in February 2017 paves the way to bring digital annotation natively to browsers, fulfilling an original vision for networked information laid out by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Publishers are exploring annotation to facilitate post-publication discussion layers, add author or expert commentary as supplemental content, and streamline the peer-review process. Researchers are using annotation for fact verification, entity extraction, precise citation, and preprint collaboration. Annotation technology enables the creation of unique persistent Web addresses that are much more precise than page-level URLs, thus opening up new workflow possibilities in scholarly communications and beyond.