Founded in 2011, the Hypothesis Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to the mission of an open, interoperable annotation capability for humanity. We advocate for standards and open technologies as a foundation for this new paradigm, and for its adoption far and wide.

The Hypothesis Project is supported by a wide range of foundations and others who share our goal of ensuring that this new capability is built on open principles.

Over the course of a decade, the Hypothesis Project has been responsible for the initial discovery effort, technology architecture, stakeholder and community development, standards work and software engineering to bring annotation from a vague idea to a concrete implementation, and to begin to scale an offering around it. From 2014 to 2017, we helped lead the W3C Web Annotation Working Group which resulted in the vocabulary, data model, protocol and finally a formal recommendation.

The Hypothesis Project was started by Dan Whaley, the coder and entrepreneur who launched the online travel industry.