Recogito is a web-based environment for collaborative semantic annotation. It is open source software, and provides support for working with either text or image documents (including those served via IIIF, an open standard for publishing high-resolution imagery online). Originally, the tool has been designed with a focus on scholarly geographic annotation, i.e. the transcription, marking up and geo-resolving of maps and geographical texts, such as itineraries and travel reports, in the context of historical scholarship (e.g. to create maps from text, or to prepare a digital scholarly edition).
Over time and in response to how the tool was used and what researchers wanted Recogito’s feature set has grown continuously to: provide more general annotation functionality; widen the scope for other potential application areas; and allow for easy publication of research outputs online.
Recogito stands out for its ease of use, the unique way in which it enables novice users to perform a fairly complex and technical task – namely to create semantic markup on texts or images – without the need to deal with any of the technical aspects of semantic web technology and terminology.