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Annotation

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

An annotation is any form of additional information “superposed” on any existing data or document.

Example: If a scientist records her experimental data in a relational database and then marks some “cells” of a table with the comment “consistent with previous findings,” this additionally “marked” information is an annotation.

Key Points

Often annotations are not originally intended to be part of the collected data, and hence no data or schema structure was designed to hold it. Annotating data is a very common practice in science, where scientists would literally “mark” experimental observation with comments, and often use annotations to share their opinions in a collaborative study. As larger scale experiments are conducted and larger collaborations are formed, management of the annotated data becomes a serious challenge. In recent times, the emerging importance of annotation in scientific data management has been recognized by the Information Management community, leading...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bhagwat D., Chiticariu L., Tan W.C., and Vijayvargiya G. An annotation management system for relational databases. In Proc. 30th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2004, pp. 900–911.

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  2. Buneman P., Khanna S., and Tan W.-C. On propagation of deletions and annotations through views. In Proc. 21st ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symp. on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 150–158.2002,

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  3. Geerts F., Kementsiesidis A., and Milano D. MONDRIAN: annotating and querying databases through colors and blocks. In Proc. 22nd Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, p. 82.2006,

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  4. Gertz M. and Sattler K.-U. Integrating scientific data through external, concept-based annotations. In Proc. Workshop on Efficiency and Effectiveness of XML Tools and Techniques and Data Integration over the Web, Springer, 2002, pp. 220–240. LNCS, Vol. 2590,

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  5. Murthy S., Maier D., and Delcambre L.M.L. Querying bi-level information. In Proc. 7th Int. Workshop on the World Wide Web and Databases, pp. 7–12. 2004,

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  6. Srivastava D. and Velegrakis Y. Intensional associations between data and metadata. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, 2007, pp. 401–412.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Amarnath Gupta

Authors
  1. Amarnath Gupta
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Gupta, A. (2009). Annotation. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1306

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