In this section only a few very general recommendations can be given, as the decision how to annotate a resource or which annotation to use highly depends on the data, annotators, available tools and on the task at hand.

The most general but very important recommendation is to provide metadata for each annotation of a resource. For already existing resources, not all of the relevant information might still be known or can be reconstructed, but as much as possible of the following information should be provided together with the annotation:

When creating a new set of annotations, it is also recommended to opt for sustainability and reusability, for example by choosing a state-of-the-art representation format and a common encoding such as UTF-8 for textual data. It is also recommended to choose a fine-grained basic segmentation that fits the annotation but also allows for other annotations to build on the same segmentation layer.