  Many Web portals allow users to associate additional information with
existing multimedia resources such as images, audio, and video. However, these
portals are usually closed systems and user-generated annotations are almost
always kept locked up and remain inaccessible to the Web of Data. We believe
that an important step to take is the integration of multimedia annotations and
the Linked Data principles. We present the current state of the Open Annotation
Model, explain our design rationale, and describe how the model can represent
user annotations on multimedia Web resources. Applying this model in Web
portals and devices, which support user annotations, should allow clients to
easily publish and consume, thus exchange annotations on multimedia Web
resources via common Web standards.
