Annodex: a simple architecture to enable hyperlinking, search & retrieval of time--continuous data on the Web

Today, Web browsers can interpret an enormous amount of different file types, including time-continuous data. By consuming an audio or video, however, the hyperlinking functionality of the Web is "left behind" since these files are typically unsearchable, thus not indexed by common text-based search engines. Our XML-based CMML annotation format and the Annodex file format presented in this paper are designed to solve this problem of "dark matter" on the Internet: Continuous media files are annotated and indexed (i.e., Annodexed), enabling hyperlinks to and from the media. Furthermore, the hyperlinks do not typically point to an entire media file, but to and from arbitrary fragments or intervals. The standards proposed in to create the Continuous Media Web have been submitted to the IETF for review.