xDOC: a system for XML based document annotation and searching

XDoc is an XML based annotation tool and document repository. An annotator uses a tool to add annotations to a document, highlighting the most important parts. The annotation tool allows an annotator to select areas of text within a document and then select an annotation type. The annotations are then uploaded into a document repository. A document repository uses these electronically captured annotations as the basis for searching. From the document repository users can build queries based on the annotations to locate relevant documents. A user can specify the type of annotations that should be included in the search. Because searches are only performed over the selected annotations searches can be performed faster. Additionally, search queries can be specified using traditional keyword based approaches or by more powerful query languages such as XPath.