Dear all,

Paul and I are working on building the overall VHL site these days. I need a bit of brainstorming help (and if anyone’s reading, please feel free to chime in).

Simply put: every time a user enters in a URL, that user’s browser “talks” to the server hosting the site. Sometimes, the server will store unique identifying information about that particular computer so that, for instance, you don’t have to re-enter your login information at nytimes.com between visits, it just “remembers” you.

For various reasons, within each session, the VHL site will want to remember what a user is doing. For this, we have to be able to store information dynamically; in other words, we have to not only be able to put files on the server and be able to deliver them to the browser, we must also have the possibility of taking information from a user (when they click on a link, or fill out a web form) and store that for later retrieval. The question is, what kinds of information to store? Paul came up with a list, and I’ve added to it. Please take a look and tell us if we’re missing something. The list items starting with question marks are only tentative suggestions; please let us know in comments whether you think they’d be useful or not, and why. The more detail, the better.

N.B.: this isn’t a full list of features for the site. It just tackles one area of technical development. More actual web-based fun coming soon.

And so: we want to store information on at least two things: annotations and people.

For annotations we want to store at least:

• a unique ID
• text of the annotation
• IDs of the text/texts the annotation is relevant to
• the specific word or phrase that the annotation refers to [if any]
• ? do we want to have different types of annotation (as in Pico); if so, what would the types be? (I would think at least two types – one being “normal,” prose annotation of a sentence or a paragraph, and another being a variant encoding. Thoughts?)

For people we want to store:

• user name
• password
• different levels of access: it’d be nice to have an admin level (can edit others’ comments and do everything else), a participant user level (can edit own comments and post new ones), and a registration option for guest users that would remember their login info and perhaps the posts they’ve made on a forum. (It would, I think, make the site a lot more widely useful if there were a place where anyone at all could post a question or comment, regardless of their stature.) Others?
• ? email address and institution, so that we may generate lists of annotators and send email to them as a group, if we need to?

So, o Team: what’s missing from this list?