Re: Annotea for multimedia documents

Hi Daniel,

you can use any kind of pointer you like for the annotation in principle - it
isn't specified in the protocol. At the moment Amaya expects an annotation to
be an Xpointer, so may not understand any other kind, but examples of what is
currently possible include a plain text description or some RDf describing
what you are pointing to.

In particular it is possible to annotate an SVG image using an Xpointer, or a
SMIL file. So you could take an audio file, provide a SMIL wrapper that
effectively marks particular time points, and then use Xpointers to those
points in the SMIL as the context of your annotation. (Amaya doesn't play
audio files, but you could use some other software to fetch the annotation
and then give you a user interface to work with it).

I believe that work has been done on annotating parts of an SVG image using
Amaya, and that this is possible, but I haven't yet checked it carefully.

Remember that the protocol is in development so details may change. But I
think it will suit what you have described (I have done some thinking about
how to use it for similar things, but not yet had time to do it, let alone
write it up as examples).

Note also Marja-Riitta Koivunen's post to this list on extending the context
property:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-annotation/2003JanJun/0010

cheers

Charles McCN

On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Daniel Eschle wrote:

>
>Hello,
>
>I am looking for an annotation system for adding annotation to multimedia
>documents and I wonder if annotea may be suitable for this task. The
>protocol specification only discusses annotating HTML documents and uses
>XPointer for the <a:context> property. Why is this defined in the protocol?
>Is this this property restricted to XPointer or may I use also another
>method instead (e.g. timestamp for video)?
>
>Am I right, that on the other side it's also possible that the Annotation
>itself may be something different than a XHTML document, e.g. an audio
>file?
>
>Thanks,
>Daniel
>
>

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Thursday, 30 January 2003 10:29:08 UTC