This project is to develop one of the first, and most important, services to build upon work in the Open Archives Initiative. It will leverage the BS thesis of Todd Miller, who ran focus studies to find that the most useful extension for NDLTD would be an annotation service.
The net effect should be similar to a threaded discussion board, but there must be a clean separation between the user interface and the underlying technology to maintain the annotations. This separation should take place at the protocol level, using a derivative of the OAI protocol. Doing this will allow for interoperability with other annotation services and the building of multiple user interfaces over a single "engine".
The problem of "open annotation" and interoperability of annotation services is one that systems like CITIDEL and NSDL will soon have to deal with. This project could serve as a useful prototype of such a system.