Cross-media document annotation and enrichment

Annotation of documents is a complex and labour intensive task. So far, research has focused on supporting the annotation of documents in single media, e.g. texts or images. Much less attention has been paid to the issue of annotating documents across media, especially useful for web documents that usually contain both text and images. In this paper we describe AKTiveMedia, a tool which supports human-centric annotation of documents across media. It offers a number of features to support different types of annotations, from ontology-based ones to free comments. We discuss what we believe are the main requirements for annotating Web documents, from support of annotator communities, to the reduction of the annotation burden, to the support of document lifecycle and how they have been implemented inside AKTiveMedia. The tool has applications in annotation of web pages, personal memories and knowledge management.