Annodex is a digital media format developed by CSIRO to provide annotation and indexing of ''continuous media'', such as

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

and

video Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...

. It is based on the

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality di ...

container format, with an

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

language called CMML (Continuous Media Markup Language) providing additional metadata. It is intended to create a Continuous Media Web (CMWeb), whereby continuous media can be manipulated in a similar manner to text media on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

, including searching and dynamic arrangement of elements.

History

The specific design of the elements of the Continuous Media Web project were invented by Silvia Pfeiffer and Conrad Parker at CSIRO Australia in mid-2001. Some of the ideas behind CMML and the generic addressing of temporal offsets were proposed in a 1997 paper by Bill Simpson-Young and Ken Yap. In January 2002 the Annodex team took on two students, Andrew Nesbit and Andre Pang, along with Simon Lai who became the first person to author meaningful content in CMML. During this time the basics of the Annodex technology were designed, including the design of temporal URI fragments, the basic DTDs, the choice of the Ogg encapsulation format and the initial design of the libraries. By late 2004, Andre Pang developed the Annodex Plug-in for Mozilla Firefox Browsers, allowing for the playback of Annodex media encoded with the

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

and the

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...

audio codec An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompres ...

. Time URIs implemented at the Location Bar provides the server-side seeking functionality on Annodex media and enables hyperlinking into and out of Annodex media through a

table of contents A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page numbe ...

clip list for CMML content. Over time there was increasing development of Annodex technology from the open-source community, starting with Debian packages by Jamie Wilkinson,

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

bindings by Ben Leslie, and

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

bindings by Angus Lees. The

command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

authoring tools were completed early in 2001, whilst being continually updated to adhere to the current Version 3 of the Annodex annotation standards by 2005.Annodex Annotation Standard Version 3
/ref> In November 2005, CSIRO wanted to focus on

closed-source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and inte ...

research and build existing products on top of the technology, thus losing interest in the open source standard components of it. Therefore, a decision was made to separate out the open-source components into its own

organisation An organization or organisation (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), is an entity—such as a company, an institution, or an association—comprising one or more people and having a particular purpose. The word is derived from ...

by creating an Annodex

Foundation Foundation may refer to: * Foundation (nonprofit), a type of charitable organization ** Foundation (United States law), a type of charitable organization in the U.S. ** Private foundation, a charitable organization that, while serving a good cause ...

similar in spirit to the many other foundations that have been created around other

FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies * Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company *Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway * Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...

technologies.Annodex Foundation History

Technology

The core technical specification documents on Annodex are being developed through the Annodex community. They consist of the following components as follows:

CMML

Continuous Media Markup Language is a

markup language for time-continuous data such as audio and video. The main principles of CMML are as follows: * Enables the description of structure for a media file through marking up temporal clips * Allows attachment of

hyperlinks In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wi ...

and

annotations An annotation is extra information associated with a particular point in a document or other piece of information. It can be a note that includes a comment or explanation. Annotations are sometimes presented in the margin of book pages. For anno ...

to the clips. * Used for authoring of Annodex content through the stream tag.

Example of CMML Content



  


  Hidden Galaxies
  


  
    Related video on detection of galaxies
  
  
  What's out there?

The origin of the CMML document, along with further documentation and standards can be found a
Annodex CMML Standard Version 2.1

Annodex File Format

Annodex is an encapsulation format, which interleaves time-continuous data with CMML markup in a streamable manner. The Annodex format is built on the

encapsulation format to allows for internet servers and proxies to manage temporal subparts and reconstruct files from annodexed clips. This introduces the following stream types: * A Skeleton meta-header stream * a CMML annotation stream Further information can be found a
Annodex Annotation Format for Time-continuous Bitstreams, Version 3.0

Time intervals in URIs

To include time-continuous content such as audio and video media into the Web, it is necessary to be able to point hyperlinks into such content to address temporal offsets. Further information can be found a

Notes and references

External links

Annodex PortalAnnodex AssociationCSIRO ICT Centre
{{Xiph.org Digital container formats Science and technology in Australia Xiph.Org projects CSIRO