Like any other technology, the Semantic Web cannot succeed if the applications using it do not serve the needs of the users. Annotea is a Semantic Web based project for which the inspiration came from users’ collaboration problems in the Web. It examined what users did naturally and selected familiar metaphors for supporting better collaboration. The selected metaphors were a good match also for demonstrating the use of the Semantic Web technologies. Metadata was generated in the form of Annotea objects. It enhanced collaboration by adding flexibility to the applications and easy creation of different views. Furthermore, Annotea objects also let users to make the metadata available beyond its original purpose for many other Semantic Web applications. The first phase of Annotea introduced Web annotations and replies, that formed reply threads, and the second phase, bookmarks and topics. All of these concepts are commonly used familiar metaphors that are general enough to suit for various purposes. As a result, normal users can easily create RDF metadata that can be merged, queried and mixed with other metadata.
