Storing and Retrieving Multimedia Web Notes

Abstract

Digital annotation of multimedia documents adds personal information to a document (e.g. a web page) or parts of it (a multimedia object such as an image or a video stream contained in the document). Digital annotations can be kept private or shared among different users over the internet, allowing discussions and cooperative work. We discuss some architectural solutions and storage schemas, to the problem of annotating multimedia documents with objects which are in turn of multimedial nature. Annotations can refer to whole documents or single portions thereof, as usual, but also to multi-objects, i.e. groups of objects contained in a single document. We present a new digital annotation system organized in a client-server architecture, where the client is a plug-in for a standard web browser and the servers are repositories of annotations to which different clients can login. Annotations can be retrieved and filtered, based on their metadata descriptors, and possibly on their content, and one can choose different annotation servers for a document. An implementation integrated in a widely used Web browser is discussed.