Designing an Experiential Annotation System for Personal Multimedia Information Management

The challenges of Personal Information Management (PIM) are proliferating with the ever-increasing availability of systems for digital multimedia information capture. Assimilating such information requires supporting appropriate user-media interaction paradigms as well as developing data models that can represent the true multi-media nature of the information. This paper examines the problem of facilitating user annotations of media in light of the aforementioned context. Annotations, while universally acknowledged to greatly enhance the information content and interaction experience, are often tedious and complex for users to enter. In real-world usage, these problems deter users from annotating media data, which in turn greatly reduces the efficacy of media management systems. In this paper we show how principles from experiential computing and unified multimedia modeling can be used to address many of the challenges that contribute to the complexity of annotating media. The resulting experiential annotation system supports direct user-data interactions using audio, graphical, and text modalities. An integrated annotationpresentation-interaction allows the use of these modalities, potentially in conjunction, to reduce the tedium associated with the annotation process. Additionally, an event-based unified data model and spatio-temporal representation of information are used to retain data context and thus further ameliorate the “annotation bottleneck”. User studies are used to determine the efficacy of the proposed approach.