ECHO Software

The ECHO project is an initiative of three Max-Planck Institutes in the fields of Humanities to create a European virtual infrastructure for digital representation, storage and conservation of European Cultural Heritage that can be accessed via the internet. For one of ECHO's Case Study (4) a comparative study of European Sign Language is being performed. For this project we want to place fully annotated sign language data on the internet and want them to be accessible to anyone intrested. This requires development of multi-media technologies which allow distributed annotation of a central corpus. The Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen therefore developed two software tools: IMDI and ELAN.

	The IMDI (ISLE Metadata Initiative) Browser was developed by the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen with the aim of managing data and metedatafiles. IMDI allows you to access data through a hierarchical tree structure and a world map. Further more it supports linking of media, annotation and metadata files and gives you the opportunity to search metadata files. More info...
	ARBIL is a new metadata editor that was created within the CLARIN project. It can easily read and edit larger sets of IMDI documents, facilitating the creation of systematic metadata files. More info...
	ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool that allows you to create, edit, visualize and search annotations for video and audio data. It was developed with the aim to provide a sound technological basis for the annotation and exploitation of multi-media recordings. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of languages, sign languages, and gesture, but it can be used by everybody who works with media corpora, i.e., with video and/or audio data, for purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation. More info...