Hello,
A friend of mine is doing a multimodal conversation analysis and it seems that trova is very good way of “visualising” the data and the analysis to the readers.There are some features that she certainly wants to use.However,we can only find Annex as demo and not as a downloadable version.
Is there a desktop version of Annex that can create .html files to be presented or a package that has the server files to use privately?I found a reference like that at the presentation of DOBES workshop 2009.
Thank you
Hello ggiouzelis,
Firstly, I believe your (friend’s) question is about Annex (the visualization component) rather than Trova (the metadata search engine), although the two are parts of the same project.
A desktop version of Annex exists, but it is currently not available to the public. This version simply allows you to view annotations locally, making it rather pointless for most users (since, if you simply want to view annotations locally, you can use Elan instead). However, I think the purpose of the question is to embed an annotated media resource in a web page or other presentation, so the desktop version is not useful to you.
For displaying within a web page, Annex has to interact with a server component – embedding a resource like it in a html file without external components is not yet technically feasible – so you have a couple of options.
Firstly, there is a simple LAT server with most of our software, including Annex, available at http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/VMwareImage as a virtual image for VMware. Running this would give you the full power of Annex and the rest of the TLA suite on your own computer.
There is another possibility. It is possible to embed an instance of Annex in a normal html page that contains a reference to an “external resource”. This simply means that you would put a web page on your own web server, along with the annotation (say, eaf file) and any media files. The web page would embed a reference to Annex on MPI’s server, which would fetch the annotation from your server. To anyone viewing the page this looks seamless (somewhat like an embedded Youtube video) – they are not directed to the MPI site at any point. If this sounds like what you want, I can give more details on how to invoke Annex in this way.
Hopefully this helps you (or rather your friend) to decide on the best approach.
Regards,
Lari Lampen
The Language Archive, MPI
I have tried to implement the LAT server but I get an error at the lamus link.Do you think you can provide me with some more information of how I can do it with the embeding method?
Thank you
Hi again,
I attempted to make a test page for your problem, but I found that overzealous security checks in Annex prevent it from being done. I will reply to this thread again when a new version of Annex with a fix for this issue is deployed. I expect that to happen in the next week or two.
Regards,
Lari
Hi again ggiouzelis,
To use the embedding method, first you have to place the annotation file and the associated media on a web server that is visible to the public. So let’s assume that the annotation file is at http://www.yoursite.com/a.eaf and the video file is at http://www.yoursite.com/a.mp4. (If the annotation is made with a tool other than ELAN, it may not be an .eaf file. That’s generally OK.)
Then go to this web address, replacing the samples with actual addresses where you placed the files:
That should open your annotation for viewing in the full-size Annex. You can then press the “embed” button to get an HTML snippet, which you can paste into any HTML document, thus including your annotation in a web page.
If you encounter an error, double check that the addresses are spelled correctly and that the files are indeed accessible at those addresses. If that doesn’t help, post details of the problems to this forum and I’ll see what I can make of it.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Lari
Just a heads up to anyone who stumbles on this old topic. For security reasons, you also need to define a cross-domain policy on the server where the media is hosted. This means hosting a file called crossdomain.xml with the appropriate settings. If you have problems with it, feel free to ask here.