Annotation based personal knowledge management of research scholars

Students enrolled in postgraduate degree programs such as M.Tech. and Ph.D. are required to learn research methodology and to contribute in the body of knowledge. They spend considerable amount of time in literature survey which involves going through published articles and research papers to identify their domain of interest and issues to be addressed. While going through these publications, they underline/color one or more sentences or write their comments, observations, queries or explanation about the contents either on separate sheets of paper or on the document itself. These annotations on research articles represent important components of personal knowledge of the research scholars. It is highly desirable to have a tool which provides assistance to research scholars in management of their personal knowledge assets. In this paper, we present a web based tool which provides facilities to annotate research papers, to manage and share these annotations and to infer characteristic features of annotators and maintains a personal knowledge base of research scholar which includes research papers of their interest (both annotated and unannotated), annotations on them, relationships between annotations and network of research peers. This tool has been designed based on a survey conducted with Ph.D. scholars and teachers from different discipline of engineering to identify types of annotation markers, their purposes and usage. Our analysis of annotated research papers indicated that underline and coloring of the sentences are dominant annotation markers and they serve same purpose of indicating importance and relevance of annotated content. Comments and observations were primarily used to either as an explanation or as an opinion about the contents. We have designed a RDF schema for the above knowledge base which is stored as RDF document.