Annotations for Supporting Collaboration through Artifacts

Shared artifacts and environments play a prominent role in shaping the collaboration between their users. This article describes this role and explains how annotations can provide a bridge between direct communication and collaboration through artifacts. The various functions of annotations are discussed through examples that represent some of the important trends in annotation research. Ultimately, some of the research issues are briefly discussed, followed by my perspective on the future of asynchronous distributed collaborative systems with respect to annotations.