OntoELAN: An Ontology-based Linguistic Multimedia Annotator

TL;DR

OntoELAN is a pioneering ontology-based multimedia annotation tool for linguistic data, enabling semantic-rich annotation of audio and video recordings to improve searchability and data accessibility.

Contribution

It introduces the first ontology-supported audio/video annotation tool in linguistics, supporting ontology loading, profile creation, and semantic annotation storage.

Findings

Supports OWL ontologies and profile customization.

Enables creation of ontological tiers for annotation.

Stores annotations as Multimedia Ontology instances.

Abstract

Despite its scientific, political, and practical value, comprehensive information about human languages, in all their variety and complexity, is not readily obtainable and searchable. One reason is that many language data are collected as audio and video recordings which imposes a challenge to document indexing and retrieval. Annotation of multimedia data provides an opportunity for making the semantics explicit and facilitates the searching of multimedia documents. We have developed OntoELAN, an ontology-based linguistic multimedia annotator that features: (1) support for loading and displaying ontologies specified in OWL; (2) creation of a language profile, which allows a user to choose a subset of terms from an ontology and conveniently rename them if needed; (3) creation of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with profile terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) saving annotations in the XML format as Multimedia Ontology class instances and, linked to them, class instances of other ontologies used in ontological tiers. To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation.