AnnoTools are a series of experimental Mozilla Firefox Annozilla Extension Extensions for making phrase-level semantic annotations. This typically involves hundreds of annotated spans per document, preferably viewed with multi-color highlighting.

The AnnoTool Extension currently involves a few patches to the latest beta-test version of Annozilla (for Firefox 3) - intended to be incorporated in the next of release of Annozilla - and installing an additional extension.

The latest AnnoTool extends Annozilla by adding...

• One-click Annotation: toolbar and right menu pop-up items that allow spans of text to be annotated with a given collection of types (Condition, Recommentation)
• Frames: a facility to associate annotations with each other, using a drag and drop interface, resulting in semi-structured annotation bodies with fields for each attribute.

AnnoTool, Take 3: The AMIA NLP-WG Edition

Potential Extensions, Desiderata: In addition to further refinements of the above extended features, several other enhancements could be desirable

• alternate highlight coloring: show/hide by color selection (implementable by switching between alternate StyleSheets; currently, each document may be associated with an alternate stylesheet via a meta-annotation)
• ...a work in progress...open to suggestions!

AnnoTool, Take 2: an initial AMIA NLP-WG edition

Annotool, Take 1: The HGML TagSet Footnotes Edition (for Firefox 2)

• "Footnotes" View: an additional browser pane appearing below the document, in which annotations of the document can be displayed in a "footnote" format
• Hierarchical Tagset Menu in the Sidebar: an additional pane of the Annozilla "sidebar" can be configured to load and display a hierarchy (eg from an ontology) of annotation types that can be assigned virtually "at the click of a button". This is intended to be comparable to the GATE and iAnnotate Class Browser interface.
• Dynamic alternate stylesheets via annotation (for alternate highlight coloring)
• A drag/droppable dropdown toolbar button

AnnoTools is currently an independent Firefox extension that should be installed over a patched versions of Annozilla 0.6.7 and XPointerLib 0.2.4 for Firefox 2 (See: Greg's Annozilla Patch Page).
The next version is planned for the latest alpha release of Annozilla for Firefox3.
For more information, please contact cgreg at cgreg.com