A Distributed Collaboration Framework for Stream Annotation

Research groups and software companies have developed a number of multimedia collaboration tools such as Access Grid and Vannotea to archive collaborative objects such as audiovisual communications and digital annotations. Most of these tools are designed to process multimedia data streams, and it is not easy for their users to extend or modify them to support other types of data streams such as those generated by earthquake sensors and medical instruments. It is challenging to design and develop a system that supports creating, sharing and replaying annotations on user specific data streams. In this paper, we make a general survey of several popular collaboration and annotation tools, and then present our prototype of a distributed collaboration framework that enables annotation of generic data streams. It supports basic collaborative annotation operations on the data, and it also provides a set of capturing and rendering interfaces that simplify the procedure of adding support for new types of data streams.