Towards a workflow-based design of multimedia annotation systems

Annotation techniques for multimedia contents have found their way into multiple areas of daily use as well as professional fields. A large number of research projects can be assigned to different specific subareas of digital annotation. Nevertheless, the annotation process, bringing out multiple workflows depending on different application scenarios, has not sufficiently been taken into consideration. A consideration of respective processes and workflows requires detailed knowledge about practices of digital multimedia annotation. In order to establish fundamental groundwork towards workflow-related research, this paper presents a comprehensive process model of multimedia annotation which results from a conducted empirical study. Furthermore, we provide a survey of the tasks that have to be accomplished by users and computing devices, tools and algorithms that are used to handle specific tasks, and types of data that are transferred between workflow steps. These aspects are assigned to the identified sub-processes of the model.