Use Cases

While there are too many use cases to discuss them all in detail, it is useful to hightlight some key scenarios that serve as input to the design process.

The most common use case for annotations is simply attaching a textual comment to an existing media. This could take the form of a commenting system, an overlaid digital sticky-note.

An extension to this scenario is when the body or the target being annotated is not just textual. It could be a video or audio file, for example, which is about an image or data set. Commenters can easily leave video or audio comments and associate it with a specific media with the ability to easily upload from mobile devices or computers with webcams.

The ability to annotate arbitrary media is particularly important in many production use cases, where different media formats, large scale datasets, frames, 3d Models and many others are the topic of discussions.

Tagging resources, either with a simple string or a semantic URI, is also a very common case. For instance tagging a media with a specific Vendor ID, Database ID to then pass it along to other vendorts that would tag the resource with their own IDs.

Machines also create annotations to be consumed by other machines. Image/Video Mining applications can quickly annotate every image or audio, and then build upon those annotations to create relationships between them.

Use Cases

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