Intuitive and Formal Transparency in Annotation Schemes

This paper explores the application of the notion of ‘transparency’ to annotation schemes, understood as the properties that make it easy for potential users to see the scope of the scheme, the main concepts used in annotations, and the ways these concepts are interrelated. Based on an analysis of annotation schemes in the ISO Semantic Annotation Framework, it is argued that the way these schemes make use of ‘metamodels’ is not optimal, since these models are often not entirely clear and not directly related to the formal specification of the scheme. It is shown that by formalizing the relation between metamodels and annotations, by formalizing the relation between metamodels and annotations, both can benefit and can be made simpler, and the annotation scheme becomes intuitively more transparent.