Description
Annotorious is an open source Web image annotation tool. It is a spin-off result from the EU-funded EuropeanaConnect project, and enables anyone maintaining a Web page to turn images on their site into interactive, collaborative drawing & communication canvases. Integration of Annotorious couldn't be simpler: only two lines of additional code are needed - and then users are able to select part of an image, and leave a text comment on it. Annotorious also features a flexible plugin system through which it can be easily customized or extended to meet domain-specific requirements.
AIT Contribution
AIT has been the lead developer of the original annotation prototypes that have been implemented as part of EuropeanaConnect. After the successful completion of EuropeanaConnect, AIT researchers have re-architected the core features of the prototypical code, and continued to maintain it as an independent Open Source project. The Open Source community has since started to pick up on the tool and contributed additional features, such as the ability to support touch-based devices.
Demonstration:Annotorious' functionality is showcased in the 'DEMOS' section of the Website. The 'Just the Basics' demo is ideal to demonstrate the core functionality (creating rectangular selections by dragging a box and saving it on the image). A second demo ("OpenLayers Annotation") showcases how Annotorious can be used with high-resolution zoomable images. Another interesting demo is the "Semantic Tagging" demo. This demo showcases a plugin - an extra piece of functionality which is not part of the Annotorious core software, but which is a modular extension. The extension monitors the text which is typed by the user - and whenever it identifies a place-, person, organization-name, etc. in the annotation text, it will automatically suggest it as a tag. For example, try to type the text 'A church in Hallstatt, Upper Austria'. In the digital library field as well as for many scholarly use cases (annotation of cultural history material, in museum and library domains, etc.) tagging with a pre-defined categorization scheme (such as the one underlying the tag suggestions) is crucial to organize data - and Annotorious provides a simple and easy to use interface for this kind of tagging activity.
