annotaatio

Annotaatio is the act of adding notes, comments, explanations, or metadata to a source to aid understanding, analysis, or processing. The purpose can be to clarify content, provide scholarly context, organize information, or enable computational handling. Annotations can take many forms and occur in different domains, including literature, manuscripts, bibliographies, and digital data.

In humanities and publishing, annotations appear as marginalia, glosses, or critical notes in scholarly editions, helping readers grasp linguistic features, historical context, or authorial intent. In library and information science, bibliographic annotations summarize a work's content, scope, and relevance. In computer science and data science, annotation refers to the labeling of data to train algorithms, such as tagging images with objects, annotating text with parts of speech or named entities, or marking sentiment.

The annotation process typically follows explicit guidelines and involves one or more annotators who apply a predefined schema. Quality control includes measuring inter-annotator agreement, resolving disagreements, and updating guidelines. Technologies range from manual annotation tools to semi-automatic and crowdsourcing platforms, often with version control and audit trails.

Challenges include subjectivity, inconsistency, cultural bias, and scalability. Effective annotation requires clear scope, well-defined categories, training, and documentation of decisions, enabling better interpretation, retrieval, and machine learning performance.