Patent ID: 7669117

Claim:
A method for exchanging information between entities on a network comprising: identifying a plurality of data elements capable of being instantiated by each of a plurality of applications on the network and to which global annotations may be anchored, wherein each global annotation for a given data element is stored by an annotation system independently from a representation of the given data element used by each of the plurality of software applications to represent the given data element, and wherein the plurality of data elements to which global annotations can be anchored are identified from a registry maintained by the annotation system; providing one or more interfaces for creating global annotations for an instance of one of the identified data elements instantiated by a first application in a first document, wherein a first one of the interfaces for creating global annotations is accessible from the first application, and wherein the interface is configured to capture both annotation content supplied when a global annotation is created for the instance of the identified data element and a context of the instance of the identified data element, wherein the context identifies how the first data element is used within the first document; and providing one or more interfaces for viewing, from each of the plurality of applications, the global annotations, wherein a first one of the interfaces for viewing the global annotations is accessible from a second application capable of instantiating the first data element in a second document using a representation of the data element different than the representation of the first data element in the first document, and wherein the global annotation created for the first data element, when viewed, presents the annotation content and the context identifying how the first data element is used in the first document.