Tiddlywiki contains most of the pieces you look for, though it is not oriented to annotation, but rather edition.

A wiki in one html page, all javascript and styling needed. It just needs a place to POST the page after edition, and I guess turning off its "all editable" character is reasonably easy.

Sit tight. Lots of those "web 2.0" providers are working on offline support. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I assume this will take the form of a specialized Web server, probably on some random port, as it will have to work on Windows as well, where you can't reasonably expect Apache or the like.

Annotea is an RDF solution to annotation of web documents and there's a firefox plugin (Annozilla) that supports creating and sharing annotations. I can't recall whether they are stored locally but the Annotea standard defines a protocol which is pretty simple and could be implemented on a local RDF store.

Take a look at this Norm. It's for annotating HTML documents, but a nice UI.

I wrote a system inspired by Jack Sloccum's (the one Bruce links to above) for the book I'm working on. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but if you're interested drop me a line and I'd be glad to share the code and talk about how it works.

You also might be interested in the annotation system for the GPLv3 drafts. Unlike Jack's and mine it allows comments on arbitrary ranges of text. I think it feels a bit clunky, but it works pretty well.

The Firefox addon Scrapbook kinda sorta fits. It's got the annotations and offline aspects down. I use subversion to maintain scrapbooks across multiple machines but it would be a bit clunky to share scrapbooks among groups this way.

maybe stickis is something for you? i have been pondering this question for a looooooong time (the time i wrote about this was in January 2000) and i guess (or maybe i just hope) now that atom/app is out, this would be the ideal platform for interacting with an annotation server. most solutions (like stickis) suffer from centralized architectures, annotea included. i'd like to see a decentralized architecture, so that i could subscribe to various annotation servers, if i feel like it.

i think that an atom/app-based solution using a better XLink (i am finally convinced that XLink has just too many fundamental design flaws to be worth to be fixed) is the solution, we'll whether this will happen. add google gears, and things are getting interesting...

Annotea does cover much of the problem reasonably well, and isn't difficult to hack against (a long while back I did some stuff on it with rather unlikely MSXML). Sticking it on a local server might be a decent holding pattern. But it certainly is in need of updating - and while you're at it, you might want to look at revising XPointer...

this might be interesting.

http://www.hanzoweb.com/?

I havent used it myself though.

gl, Jim Fuller

You might be interested in Textensor Notate - it'll let you do the online part of group annotation / discussion of web pages and uploaded documents without installing any plugins (on IE7 or Firefox) there's a sandbox to play with it without setting up an account ... currently it's in beta, we'll think about how we might make the next version work offline too.

Norm, please write a piece if you find a solution that's acceptable for you; I think I mostly share your requierements and constraints but it's not pressing enough for me to go and check out all the links that your commenters suggest. 8-)

The first commenter mentioned Tiddlywiki as a good solution. People have actually been using it (and similar tools) for in-house review and collaboration on projects. Reviews are mixed and depend partly on strength of implementation and partly on the mix of features required and/or absent in a particular situation.

TiddlyWiki does not do annotation. Especially not of an external, local/network file or a webpage. It is ideally poised to take advantage of annotation technology, but nothing is being developed that I know of.

It seems a shame that either demand for a good annotation and collaboration method is so weak, or the technology just isn't ready.

I've sensed the same need you write about, and I'll be checking out the links for something I can puppet with TiddlyWiki through an iframe window.

Thanks,

Coby

http://code.google.com/p/marginalia/

Marginalia is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text and write margin notes. Marginalia has been integrated into several web applications.

Following up on Fred's earlier comment, we've just released a.nnotate which is aimed at exactly this problem (it still doesn't work off-line though). All the annotations that have been made are available as JSON (could be XML if anyone is interested) though putting them back in the right place on a PDF is not always trivial. The downloadable read-only version of document+annotations will be out with the next version. There is a free trial, and if anyone has further ideas about exactly what is needed in this space, do get in touch!

Robert