Collaborative annotation

For more information on non-collaborative annotation click here.

Corpus Management Tool settings

Collaborative annotation is possible thanks to a Corpus Management Tool.

General approach

In essence, the Corpus Management Tool (CMT) is a central repository in which all the collaborative corpora are stored and shared between all the authorized users on a server. This tool supports management actions like registration, retrieval and update of a collaborative corpus, a particular text or a tag set.

The CMT controls the collaboration among different users, coordinating and controlling the different actions to be performed over a given resource according to its status. (Sánchez-Tornel et al., 2009)

CMT Settings

Go to the Config menu and click Config, or click CTRL + T. Make sure that the information under CMT Config is correct.

Creating a collaborative corpus

Registration of a collaborative corpus

Let's suppose we have created a corpus file and have added documents or texts to this corpus and, this is important, this corpus is active/open in BACKBONE Annotator.

Now, open the collaboration menu and click Register Collaborative Corpus and name your corpus. This is the name that your collaborative corpus will have on the CMT. If you have no Internet access, the WSDL address is incorrect, or the server is down, you will get this message. If your user and password settings are incorrect, you will get this alert. If your corpus has been successfully registered, you will get this message.

Now that our collaborative corpus is registered in the CMT, we can start the annotation process. Please note that the corpus is not stored anymore on your machine but on the CMT/server. If you need a copy of this, use "save as" and store on your hard drive.

Visibility and deletion

When you want BACKBONE Search Tool to "see" your corpus, you can change its status from private to public, and viceversa. You can also, delete a corpus from the CMT. Be very careful with this function. You could not only delete your own corpus but any other corpus in the CMT.

Opening a collaborative corpus

To open a collaborative corpus stored in the CMT, click here and select the corpus you want to work with from the menu.

Changing the taxonomy tree

If you want to add or delete a category from the taxonnomy tree, you will need to "lock" it first. When you lock the taxonomy of a collaborative corpus, you are making sure nobody else is doing the same and only you is performing changes. So the steps are the following: 1. Click taxonomy; 2. Click Lock Tree; 3. You are set. You will see this; 4. Now add a new category, if that's what you are seeking; 5. Unlock the tree now. The following window will promt you to accept/save the changes.