Multimedia Annotations

From Open Video Alliance

Contents 1 Background and Theory 2 Open Standards 3 Open Source Tools and Frameworks 3.1 Textual Annotations 3.2 Image Annotations 3.3 Audio Annotations 3.4 Video Annotations Web Editing 3.5 Integrated Solutions 4 Proprietary Tools 4.1 Text Annotations 4.2 Image Annotations 4.3 Audio Annotations and Web Editing 4.4 Video Annotations and Web Editing 4.5 Integrated Solutions 5 Related Projects and Interested Organizations

[edit] Background and Theory

For thousands of years critical and scholarly discourse around text has revolved around citation and reference.

What does this kind of discourse look like around multimedia?

Technically speaking, fine-grained, user created content annotations are an abstraction intended to capture engagements which involve attaching information to content on a per-user, per-object basis. For contrast, DublinCore metatdata is per-object (as are categories in the wikipedia), while folksonomic systems like flickr and del.icio.us annotate content (images and links, respectively) per-user, per-object.

This abstraction lies at the heart of participatory media and social networking systems. Central to these systems is the symmetry of the relationships. It is just as important to be able to look up all the annotations by a particular user, as it is to look up all the annotations on a particular object, as it is to look up all the annotations which have something in common and tie them back to the contributor and the original object.

A robust user contributed content annotation framework would provide the core services to support a number of increasingly critical features which community driven sites rely upon.

See also: Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaboration and Teaching in the New Vernacular (audio)

[edit] Open Standards

• Annotea - W3C standard for specifying annoations using an RDF based schema
• CNI's OAC Working Group (Open Annotation Collaboration) - Enabling interoperable annotation of scholarly digital resources
• time-based metadata standard draft Specifying time intervals in URI queries and fragments of time-based Web resources
• W3C Media Fragments WG The mission of the Media Fragments Working Group, part of the Video in the Web Activity, is to address temporal and spatial media fragments in the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).
• W3C Media Annotation WG develops an ontology and API designed to facilitate cross-community data integration of information related to media objects in the Web, such as video, audio and images.

[edit] Open Source Tools and Frameworks

[edit] Textual Annotations

• Marginalia - Marginalia is an open source Javascript web annotation system that allows users of web applications to highlight text and write margin notes. Marginalia has been integrated into several web applications:

• Stet
• Commentary - Ian Bickings Paste commenting system
• Connexion's implementation of Annotea
• Django's Comment System - Django framework's paragraph level commenting system

[edit] Image Annotations

• Omeka's Image Annotation plugin
• Open Layers

[edit] Audio Annotations

[edit] Video Annotations Web Editing

• Metavid
• Kaltura
• Pad.Ma
• bvault (the openvault engine) from WGBH
• VITAL from CCNMTL (google code)
• Video Clipping in Mediawiki

[edit] Integrated Solutions

• Shift Space - an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web.
• Drupal Annotation Field
• YUCCA rdf-based, user contributed content annotations - no longer active

[edit] Proprietary Tools

[edit] Text Annotations

• Fleck Commercial, free of charge web service for textual annotations

[edit] Image Annotations

[edit] Audio Annotations and Web Editing

• EyeSpot - was invested in by Michael Robertson of mp3.com and Yahoo's JumpCut acquisition increases our expectations for this company to get bought by Google. The mix system would also be handy for MySpace's core user group, musicians who shoot their clip and then remix it to publish on their MySpace page. So News Corp is another potential acquirer.

• Lycos Mix - no, Lycos is not dead. Lycos Mix, along with Lycos Cinema, is designed to take Lycos to the next level in the online video space.

[edit] Video Annotations and Web Editing

• YouTube - you must upload the video yourself to be able to annotate it. See also - http://spliced.com/)
• http://www.bubbleply.com/ (Clipping and Overlays)
• Know the News - which allows users to re-edit various provided news footage into segments and publish the creations for viewing
• JumpCut - this video editing site was acquired by Yahoo right after it got to its public beta status. It is expected to be embedded into Yahoo Video.
• Mojiti - China based company was covered recently by Read/WriteWeb. It allows you to add notations to your videos. Mojiti is also a video sharing site targeting the Chinese market. Still around? Bought?
• ClipTV
• Viddler

[edit] Integrated Solutions

• Clipmarks

[edit] Related Projects and Interested Organizations

• OpenCast Project Mellon funded media workflow engine, with an interest in annotations
• Ellipsis from Georgetown's * CNDLS
• IAT (Image Annotation Tool), VITAL, and others from CCNMTL
• EdLab @ Teachers College Elgg and Flowplayer integration
• Critical Commons
• Project Pad from Academic Technologies Northwestern U.
• Media Matrix from Michigan State U.
• Global Lives Project
• Participatory Culture Foundation Their new miro community software might incorporate some of these elements in the future
• Project Bamboo - a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services.