NOMOS: A Semantic Web Software Framework for Annotation of Multimodal Corpora
John Niekrasz, Alexander Gruenstein · 2006
We present NOMOS, an open-source software framework for annotation, processing, and analysis of multimodal corpora.NOMOS is designed for use by annotators, corpus developers, and corpus consumers, emphasizing configurability for a variety of specific annotation tasks.Its features include synchronized multi-channel audio and video playback, compatibility with several corpora, platform independence, and mixed display of temporal, non-temporal, and relational information.We describe NOMOS from two perspectives.First, we present its software architecture, highlighting its principal difference from comparable systems: its use of an OWL-based semantic annotation back-end which provides automatic inference capabilities and a well-defined method for layering datasets.Second, we describe how the system is used.For corpus development and annotation we present a typical use scenario involving the creation of a schema and specialization of the user interface.For processing and analysis we describe the GUI-and Java-based methods available, including a GUI for query construction and execution, and an automatically generated schema-conforming Java API for processing of annotations.Additionally, we present some specific annotation and research tasks for which NOMOS has been specialized and used, including topic segmentation and decision-point annotation of meetings.