An Interactive Visual User Interface Model for Multimedia Open Annotation Tools

The W3C Open Annotation Community Group’s Open Annotation (OA) Data Model is emerging as a standardized Web Annotation Data Model. We argue that a friendly interactive visual user interface for OA Data Model based annotation tools, which is largely based on an effective user interface model, plays an essential role in the usability of the tools. In this paper we propose an Interactive Visual User Interface Model for Open Annotations (or simply IVUIM4OA), which allows the annotating user to dynamically transform OA data into a visual representation and to interactively manipulate the visual objects to modify the OA data or produce new one. IVUIM4OA is an adaptation of a generic information visualization model, the Data State Reference Model, for the specifics of the visualization of OA data; it is further extended with view operators that enable the user to interact with the visual objects. We implemented a prototype multimedia annotation tool on the basis of IVUIM4OA and conducted case study experiments with the prototype tool. The implementation and experimental results show that the proposed IVUIM4OA is feasible and works well with the OA Data Model, in such a way that the annotating user can obtain a better understanding of and more intuitive interaction with the annotation data.