A distributed framework for collaborative annotation of streams

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 specified data streams. In this paper, we make a survey of several popular collaboration and annotation tools, and then present our prototype of a distributed framework that supports collaborative annotation on generic data streams. It supports basic annotation operations on the stream 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.