The Ambulant Annotator: Medical Multimedia Annotations on TabletPC’s

A new generation of tablet computers has stimulated end-user interest on annotating documents by making pen-based commentary and spoken audio labels to otherwise static documents. The typical application scenario for most annotation systems is to convert existing content to a (virtual) image, capture annotation mark-up, and to then save the annotations is a database. While this is often acceptable for text documents, most multimedia documents are timesensitive and can be dynamic: content can change often depending on the types of audio/video data used. Our work looks at expanding the possibilities of annotation by integrating annotations onto timed basis media. This paper discusses the AMBULANT Annotation Architecture. We describe requirements for multimedia annotations, the multimedia annotation architecture being developed at CWI, and initial experience from providing various classes of temporal and spatial annotation within the domain of medical documents.