sense of his annotation and associate a value to the defined attribute. We assume that this approach will allow user to contextualize documents or documentobjects of interest and will provide a good basis for data restructuring, data mining, robust exploitation and knowledge elicitation, among others. 

In our approach to represent annotation, we identify five functional requirements that must be considered in designing an annotation system: 

```
- Structure: the structure of an annotation is as important as the content of the annotation. As earlier explained, allowing a user to express his observation 
   and/or contextualize document object of interest as attribute-value pair annotation could improve significantly the effectiveness of such valued-added 
                                                                                                                                              
   information as opposed to adding annotation as atomic object only. Users should have the possibilities of expressing their views without restriction. 
                                                                                                                                              
   They should be able to choose the word, phrase or sentence that best suit what they intend to represent. 
                                                                                                  
- Communication: users may share their perceptions of the decision problem or of any information through annotation in a collaborative environment. 
   The conclusion arrived at about the object of deliberation (decision problem) could be added to the initial information source as annotation. The use of 
                                                                                                                                              
   annotation as a platform for economic actors to share one another's perception could be done synchronously or asynchronously. With synchronous
                                                                                                                                             
   annotation, users can communicate with one another in real time. It however, requires all participating actors to be online. With asynchronous 
                                                                                                                                              
   annotation, the actors need not communicate in real time. However, a means of notifying the concerned actors about the pending messages is 
                                                                                                                                              
   necessary. 
             
- Anchor: annotation created can be anchored to the underlying document as inline annotation or as overlay depending on whether the user has access 
   right to modify the document or not. Considering the wealth of information that resides in different sources of information, annotation tool that does 
                                                                                                                                              
   not take into consideration the structure of documents will prove more valuable. 
                                                                             
- Scalability: there should be the possibility of growth on annotation made. Annotations could become document for further annotations. 
- Reusability: previous annotations made should be reusable. Users should be able to adapt previous annotations to similar problem without necessarily 
   modifying it. A modified annotation becomes another annotation. 
                                                               
- Granularity: users should be able to add annotation to document or document object of interest at any level of granularity. No restriction should be place 
   on what to annotate and where to place such annotation. There should be the possibility of adding annotations both at coarse-grain level and fine-grain 
                                                                                                                                              
   level. For example, annotation might be added to document title, paragraph, sentence, phrase, text, word, image section etc. 
                                                                                                                     

   Figure 2 below shows the logical view of annotation-as-process taking into consideration the complexity of annotation discussed above. The document to 
                                                                                                                                                         
be annotated is fetched from document database. For a user to create annotation, he needs to log in if his profile is already stored in the user database or 
                                                                                                                                                         
register as a new user. Then he can create annotation or make a follow up annotation on the document or its content. The annotation created, the anchoring 
                                                                                                                                                         
information and the information on the user are stored in the annotation database. Information stored in both annotation database and user database is a form 
                                                                                                                                                         
of knowledge base. Knowledge on annotation pattern of an individual actor or annotations made concerning a decision problem can be extracted. We have 
                                                                                                                                                         
separated annotating the entire document from annotating parts of a document to make searching more effective. Anchoring an annotation to an entire 
                                                                                                                                                         
document involves linking the annotation to the Uniform Resource Identifier of the document.

```
