annotation

An annotation is a marked-up comment made to information in a book, document, online record, video, software code or other information. Commonly this is used, for example, in draft documents, where another reader has written notes about the quality of a document at a certain point, "in the margin", or perhaps just underlined or highlighted passages. Annotated bibliographies, give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument. Creating these comments, usually a few sentences long, establishes a summary for and expresses the relevance of each source prior to writing.

Software programming

Annotations provide data about a software program that is not part of the program itself. They have no direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate.

Annotations have a number of uses, among them:

• Information for the compiler — Annotations can be used by the compiler to detect errors or suppress warnings.
• Compiler-time and deployment-time processing — Software tools can process annotation information to generate boilerplate code, XML files, and so forth.
• Runtime processing — Some annotations are available to the developer/manager for examination at runtime.

Annotations can be applied to a program's declarations of classes, fields, methods, interfaces, arrays and other program elements.

Computational biology

Since the 1980s, molecular biology and bioinformatics have created the need for DNA annotation.

For DNA annotation, a previously unknown sequence representation of genetic material is annotated with information relating genomic position to intron-exon boundaries, regulatory sequences, repeats, gene names and protein products.

This annotation is stored in genomic databases as Mouse Genome Informatics, FlyBase, and WormBase.

Educational materials on some aspects of biological annotation from this year's Gene Ontology annotation camp and similar events are available at the Gene Ontology website.

Imaging

In the digital imaging community the term annotation is commonly used for visible metadata superimposed on an image without changing the underlying master image, such as sticky notes, virtual laser pointers, circles, arrows, and black-outs (cf. redaction).

Law

In the United States, legal publishers such as Thomson West and Lexis Nexis publish annotated versions of statutes, providing information about court cases that have interpreted the statutes. Both the federal United States Code and state statutes are subject to interpretation by the courts, and the annotated statutes are valuable tools in legal research.

Linguistics

This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. (December 2006)

In linguistics, morphological, syntactic, semantic, discourse and pragmatic annotations add information about the linguistic form. Other forms of annotation include comments and metadata; these non-transcriptional annotations are also non-linguistic. A collection of texts with linguistic annotations is known as a corpus (plural corpora). The Linguistic Annotation Wiki describes tools and formats for creating and managing linguistic annotations.

See also

Look up annotation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Automatic image annotation
• Coding (social sciences)
• Marginalia
• Web annotation
• Footnote
• Abstract (summary)
• Nota Bene
• Comment