Visions 2005 is an oceanography project generating hundreds of hours of underwater video and data streams that require real-time analysis by teams of scientists
Image of Tubeworm Plumes, Copyright Visions 2005
Hypothetical Usage Scenario:
A Marine Biologist from the University of Queensland (UQ) browses the latest collection of deep water video footage, which was made available by the Visions'05 project at the University of Washington (UW). UQ and UW are both part of a Shibboleth Federation. Visions'05 has set up access policies that allow staff members from the Marine Biology department at UQ to gain full access to their online repository as part of their collaboration.
The Marine Biologist opens a particular recent video within Vannotea so that he can bookmark and attach his personal notes to segments of the video, keyframes or regions within frames. To secure his notes, he reuses an existing policy that grants access to all of the participants of this collaboratory. Through this policy, his notes are securely stored on an Annotation Server at UQ. Whilst the Annotation Server is shared amongst other departments at UQ and other members of the Federation, his annotations are only visible to members of the collaboratory.
The Marine Biologist notices a close up of a unrecognizable tubeworm species in a hydrothermal vent being filmed in one of the videos. He highlights it with one of the drawing tools and posts a question "unknown species of tubeworm?" to the annotation server. It is early in the morning, and his Jabber contact list indicates that his colleague, an Oceanographer at UW, is still online. He fires up a videoconferencing tool to speak to the Oceanographer. The Oceanographer starts Vannotea, and is invited to join a Jabber conference room by the Marine Biologist. This triggers an event that opens up the same video at the same location inside the Oceanographers Vannotea Client. All annotations by this collaboratory are also retrieved, including the "unknown species of tubeworm" annotation the Marine Biologist posted earlier.
The Marine Biologist hits the record button. This records their conversation and the application events they fire whilst collaboratively watching and browsing the same video content. They start looking for other occurrences of the tubeworm while discussing the matter. Every time they see one, they pause the video, highlight the region and store it as an annotation reply of type bookmark to the "unknown species" annotation on the Annotation server. As a result of their discussion, they not only get a list of all locations of the unidentified tubeworm within the video, but they also narrow the classification down to three different possible species of tubeworm. They terminate the session and the Marine Biologist uploads the recorded session, including the video/audio and a time stamped log file of the application events, to a shared repository. He also creates an annotation that links to the audiovisual recording of the videoconference session.
A few hours later, another member of the collaboratory at the University of London starts her work day. She checks her RSS feeds and notices new annotations about an "unknown species of tubeworm" on the annotation servers that she has access to. A simple double-click opens the annotation and the video inside Vannotea and jumps to the frame that shows the worm. She goes through the list of bookmarks that point to the different occurrences. Still unsure, she retrieves the discussion and replays the complete session between her two colleagues earlier. Curious, she starts researching online publications relating to the three possible worm species and is able to reject them through her findings, which she links by posting further replies.
By using Vannotea, the globally distributed collaborators are able to analyse, annotate, and share their knowledge about the multimedia research data, either synchronously or asynchronously without compromising security. There is a possibility that they have discovered a new species of tube worm that only survives in high temperatures and deep sea conditions of hydrothrmal vents. This finding can be kept confidential until such time that they are ready to be published.