A brief history of the Madcow software

We started this project in 2002 with User-Centered Annotation Tool (UCAT) which allows students to annotate, following their personal styles, (using different icons, colors and signed versions) any document belonging to authorware within a course. We have chosen Amaya as the working environment since, belonging to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), it complies with the semantic web specifications on document formats, like RDF. Then the project became a browser toolbar for IE and Firefox with the following feature:

	Annotation with content on text The annotate text dialog window shows up when the user selects a portion of text and clicks the first button of the annotation toolbar.
Annotation with content on image The dialog window of Annotate Image allows the user to annotate the selected image. The image annotation window is similar to the textual annotation one in the right side, while, in the left side, it contains the image the user wants to annotate and the toolbox to select different portions of the image, on the left.
	Link on text or image This kind of annotation allows users to insert a link to an existing web page or to a local file that is then uploaded to the annotation server.