Collaborative video indexing, annotation and discussion over high-bandwidth networks

A number of research groups and software companies have developed stand-alone digital annotation tools for textual documents, web pages, images, audio and video resources. Annotations are the 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, defence and media communities. But it is extremely challenging technically and demands significant bandwidth, particularly for video documents. Using the GrangeNet broadband network, the goal of this Masters thesis was to develop such real-time, collaborative indexing, annotation and discussion tools for digital film and video by distributed groups.