  Despite its scientific, political, and practical value, comprehensive
information about human languages, in all their variety and complexity, is not
readily obtainable and searchable. One reason is that many language data are
collected as audio and video recordings which imposes a challenge to document
indexing and retrieval. Annotation of multimedia data provides an opportunity
for making the semantics explicit and facilitates the searching of multimedia
documents. We have developed OntoELAN, an ontology-based linguistic multimedia
annotator that features: (1) support for loading and displaying ontologies
specified in OWL; (2) creation of a language profile, which allows a user to
choose a subset of terms from an ontology and conveniently rename them if
needed; (3) creation of ontological tiers, which can be annotated with profile
terms and, therefore, corresponding ontological terms; and (4) saving
annotations in the XML format as Multimedia Ontology class instances and,
linked to them, class instances of other ontologies used in ontological tiers.
To our best knowledge, OntoELAN is the first audio/video annotation tool in
linguistic domain that provides support for ontology-based annotation.
