From CATCH to HarvardX to Annotopia

On October 18, 2012, Philip Desenne (at the time Senior Product Manager, Academic Technology Services at Harvard), Martin Schreiner (Head of Maps, Media, Data and Government Information, Harvard College Library) and I got awarded a small grant from Harvard Library Labs called CATCH: Common Annotation, Tagging, and Citation at Harvard.

The idea was to create a federated network of server for storing annotations created for pedagogical purposes. As we knew there are many applications at Harvard creating annotation we wanted to provide a common back-end for all these to store, retrieve and search for annotation. The CATCH was meant to produce also some services for translating annotation into Open Annotation format so that we could store all the annotation coming from different tools in a uniform way that would have made search a lot easier.

Obviously, as I've spent the last two years developing the Domeo Annotation Tool, the idea was also to have Domeo using the same technology for storing/retrieving/searching annotation.



However, the original grant has been broken down in two phases and only the first phase has been funded so far. As result of the first phase I produced with the help of Justin Miranda, a back end for persisting annotation produced by an annotator client based on annotator.js technology.

Three weeks ago,  both client (thanks to the work by Daniel Cebrian Robles and Phil Desenne) and the CATCH server (developed by Justin Miranda and I) entered production in HarvardX for one class that counts about 14.000 students.

As the result of phase I was supposed to be just a prototype and not a production quality server, this has been a stressful and at the same time exciting transition.

In a few days, the CATCH counts already 21.000 annotation produced by more than 800 students and the number of annotations is increasing steadily.

The future of CATCH is named Annotopia
The original plan for CATCH has not been fully realized and the streaming of funding ended. So in agreement with Tim Clark (Director of MIND Informatics and PI of the Domeo project) we decided to create a new project called Annotopia that will consist in developing the full potential of the original CATCH idea. Annotopia will also provide additional services: text mining, terms search and support for semantic annotation. These features were already available in Domeo but they will be generalized and made available through APIs for third party annotation clients. 

The CATCH codebase will merge with the new platform and, at least for now, we will still refer to the name CATCH for indicating the instance for HavardX of the Annotopia annotation back-end.

The first release of Annotopia is scheduled by the end of March.