External Resource Annotation Framework and its applications in E-learning

Rich Internet Applications that enable new ways of interaction with digital objects within multimedia scenes become important for educational communities. Such new ways of advanced human-computer interaction, in its different forms match the needs of formal education as well as lifelong learning in medicine, architecture, construction or cultural heritage management. This paper presents innovative multimedia annotation methods based on advanced human-computer interaction and (a)synchronous interpersonal collaboration features, focusing on e-learning activities. They have been implemented within eRAF (External Resource Annotation Framework) with the scope of going beyond the existing solutions by introducing new annotation types using external resources. Thus, anyone can easily annotate the own resources with additional information such as real-time handwriting, text and animation, or even audio/video sequences stored into public data repositories, or recorded adhoc, in order to create value-added interactive content.