Web-Style Multimedia Annotations

Annotation of multimedia resources supports a wide range of applications, ranging from associating metadata with multimedia resources or parts of these resources, to the collaborative use of multimedia resources through the act of distributed authoring and annotation of resources. Most annotation frameworks, however, are based on a closed approach, where the annotations data is limited to the annotation framework, and cannot readily be reused in other application scenarios. We present a declarative approach to multimedia annotations, which represents the annotations in an XML format independent from the multimedia resources. Using this declarative approach, multimedia annotations can be used in an easier and more flexible way, enabling application scenarios such as third-party annotations and annotation aggregation and filtering.