Annotation in design and product engineering: an introduction to the special issue

The annotation of a document involves the embedding of data such as a textual note, a symbol or structured data in an original document at a specific location.The scope of annotations has been considerably enlarged by the latest developments in digital technologies allowing the manipulation of 3D geometry through a simple web browser and the combination of geometrical information with more complex semantic structures.The goal of this special issue is to explore a number of these particular challenges of the application of annotation in design and product engineering.