After a careful consideration of existing systems we implemented Yawas, a light annotation tool for the Web. Instead of bookmarking a document, the users of Yawas simply highlight interesting texts. At creation time, they may also add a comment and other information like the document topic or document type. Yawas then stores the document URL, title, parent URL, highlighted words and the extra information eventually provided by the user. Yawas has been used extensively by the authors, a team of 7 researchers and 18 master's students.
Users understand why they kept a page and where it came from.
They also reported that an annotation tool like Yawas should be included in Web browsers. We asked a human classifier to manually cluster a set of 350 documents highlighted by an other person. The classifier was asked to cluster the documents using either the original document, or only the highlighted texts. Since these documents could not be retrieved, the classifier could not classify them, but was still able to classify them when using the highlighted texts. During the clustering, the classifier created cluster names.