A Document Annotation Tool
Documents and images of various forms are important resources in many analysis activities. Examples of such documents include responses from questionnaires, completed forms, notes made "in the field", photographs, scans of hardcopy documents, web pages, word processed documents and diagrams. Such documents can be approached in many different ways, employing many different kinds of analysis. However in most cases it is necessary to identify or extract salient features of those images or documents which can then be quoted, counted or discussed (see, for example, ATLAS.ti - http://www.atlasti.com/).
The aim of this project is to develop a standalone application which allows the user to load, view and persistently annotate one or more forms of document and/or image. The application must be written in Java (any version). It must support at least one document or image format, but may support several (e.g. JPEG, GIF or PNG images, plain text, HTML, PDF or Word documents). It must allow annotations to be created which are directly and visibly related to the document. These annotations must be persistent, i.e. they must be able to be saved and re-loaded, and this must be independent of the original document or image. Possible forms of annotation might include (but are not limited to): drawing directly over the document or image; selecting and labeling regions of the document or image; inserting additional notes (such as footnotes) within the document or image; linking between related parts of different documents or images; identifying and marking uses of keywords or concepts. The application may allow information from the annotations (or relevant parts of the annotated document or image) to be exported for subsequent analysis, for example in a statistics package such as SPSS. Ideally the tool should be evaluated through its application to a real-world analysis problem.
Optionally, the document annotation tool can also be integrated into the Digital Replay System (DRS) http://thedrs.sourceforge.net/ (developed within the Mixed Reality Lab), which currently supports time-based annotation of audio, video and system logs and simple viewing of static documents and images but does not support annotation of documents and images. If the tool is not integrated with DRS during the project then suitable documentation and guidance should be provided so that this integration can be attempted subsequently.