Towards Interoperable Secondary Annotations in the E-Social Science Domain
Baden Hughes, Desmond Schmidt, and Andrew E. Smith
Baden Hughes
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
Desmond Schmidt, Andrew E. Smith
Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology, University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia
Email address of corresponding author: badenh@csse.unimelb.edu.au
The sharing of data for secondary analysis has been very limited, especially in the social sciences. The reasons usually cited for this limited sharing are (1) strong privacy requirements on data and (2) lack of appropriate contextual knowledge by secondary investigators. We argue that a third reason, the lack of interoperability between software tools commonly used for data annotation and coding by social scientists, is critical even if the problems identified by earlier researchers are resolved. In this paper, we describe our work in attempting to address the data interoperability issue directly by developing standards for the syntactic expression of annotation, and core libraries which can be used to manipulate the annotations in their standard format, as well as the overall system architecture and examples of analytical applications which can be used for secondary coding and analysis.
