FilmEd - collaborative video indexing, annotation, and discussion tools over broadband networks

A number of research groups and software companies have developed digital annotation tools for textual documents, Web pages, images, and audio and video resources. By annotations we mean subjective comments, notes, explanations or external remarks that can be attached to a document or a selected part of a document without actually modifying the document. When a user retrieves a document, they can also download the annotations attached to it from an annotation server to view their peer's opinions and perspectives on the particular document or to add, edit or update their own annotations. The ability to do this collaboratively and in real time during group discussions is of great interest to the educational, medical, scientific, cultural, defense, and media communities. But it is extremely challenging technically and demands significant bandwidth, particularly for video documents. In this paper, we describe a unique prototype application developed over the Australian GrangeNet broadband research network, which combines videoconferencing over access grid nodes with collaborative, real-time sharing of an application which enables the indexing, browsing, annotation, and discussion of video content between multiple groups at remote locations.