1. A method for managing global annotations for data elements present in a data source comprising: defining a set of data elements for which global annotations may be created, wherein global annotations are stored by an annotation system independently from a representation used by a software application for a particular data element; identifying the data source accessed by a user; parsing the data source to identify a set of candidate data elements, wherein each member of the set of candidate data also appears in the set of data elements for which global annotations may be created; and returning an indication of the members of the set of candidate data elements to the software application.