Towards General-Purpose Annotation Tools - How Far Are We Today?

This paper discusses the notions of special-purpose natural interactivity and multimodality (NIMM) coding tools, limited-purpose tools, and general-purpose tools as defined in terms of a set of key requirements. In the light of these requirements the paper presents a detailed comparison of three special-purpose and six limited-purpose coding tools and discusses the challenges in building a first general-purpose NIMM annotation tool.