ANNEX - a web-based Framework for Exploiting Annotated Media Resources

Manual annotation of various media streams, time series data and also text sequences is still a very time consuming work that has to be carried out in many areas of linguistics and beyond. Based on many theoretical discussions and practical experiences professional tools have been deployed such as ELAN that support the researcher in his/her work. Most of these annotation tools operate on local computers. However, since more and more language resources are stored in webaccessible archives, researchers want to take profit from the new possibilities. ANNEX was developed to fill this gap, since it allows web-based analysis of complex annotated media streams, i.e., the users don’t have to download resources and don’t have to download and install programs. By simply using a normal web-browser they can start their linguistic work. Yet, due to the architecture of the Internet, ANNEX does not offer the options to create annotations, but this feature will come. However, users have to be aware of the fact that media streaming does not offer that high accuracy as on local computers.