Tom Coates gives us all a sneak-peek of the BBC R&D project he's been working on, as it's his last day at the beeb. The concept is to allow users to collectively describe, segment and annotate audio in a wikipedia-style fashion. The project aims to solve the problem of how to navigate and search the large archives of audio and video content that broadcasters have amassed over the last 70 odd years. Their solution was to allow users to annotate chunks of audio with wikipedia-style entries that describe the content at that point, this means it is now possible, for instance, to search for a particular scene in a video clip as there is a textual description alongside the visual content. The system also uses tags (like del.icio.us or flickr) to describe the clips and segments. Playing back an audio clip:
Annotatating/Editing an audio clip:
Check out some videos of it in action: Playing an annotated audio clip [.mov] Annotatating/Editing an audio clip [.mov]
