The Opencast Annotation Tool (formerly Annotating Academic Video by Entwine) is a video annotation service that is suitable for research, teaching or learning.

The software consists of two parts:

• The frontend component, containing the annotation webapp.
• The Opencast Backend modules, that need to be integrated into an Opencast installation.

Unlike for Opencast, the community surrounding the Opencast Annotation Tool is relatively small, and the resources for its development and maintenance limited. With that in mind it makes little sense to try to support multiple versions of the tool simultaneously. The situation also doesn't really warrant any formal and/or regular release cycle.

As a result, this project follows kind of a rolling release strategy: We try our best to have the master branch on GitHub always contain a working version of the software. Every push to master thus constitutes a release, versioned by an up-to-the-second timestamp, and the appropriate git commit hash. You can get to the source code of any particular such release by checking out the corresponding commit in git.

Our CI setup builds each such push and publishes the resulting Maven artifacts to our GitHub hosted repository.

With the same motivation of a smaller community and fewer resources, we decided to only support the currently supported Opencast versions, by default, with a strong preference towards the newer versions. We reserve the right to further restrict this commitment at any point should the maintenance burden prove too high. We also try our best to be compatible with Opencast develop, seeing as how this is going to be our next "premium support" version in at most six months time. 😉

The instructions on how to install the Annotation Tool in Opencast can be found here

A general documentation including the REST endpoints, the architecture etc. can be found here.

For discussion around the Opencast Annotation Tool the mailing list can be used. You can subscribe to the list via Google Groups or by sending a mail to [email protected].

• Entwine (now Extron)
• SWITCH
• Claudio Beffa

• virtUOS, Universität Osnabrück
• ELAN e.V.

• Rüdiger Rolf, [email protected], Phone: +49 541 969 6511

ECL 2.0