AggrGator: A Platform for Collaborative Discoverability and Annotation of Media

Abstract

There are very few good tools available that allow people to digitally categorize recorded videos. This is a problem because with the rise of digitization of recordings previously created on magnetic and other non-digital media as well as the proliferation of smartphones, there is an ever-growing volume of videos being made available to people, but a severe lack of ways to categorize and search those videos. This lack of good tools often means that many people amass large collections of self-recorded videos which are largely inaccessible, making it extremely difficult to locate past recordings due to the absence of meaningful metadata. The rise of abundant, cheap online storage resources from a wide variety of service providers simply compounds this problem. With more recorded media being produced than ever before and more and more ways to store that media but few and inadequate tools to catalog and organize it, there is a risk that many videos will go unwatched and uncared for, the importance of their content forgotten. Even if an individual video recordings were somehow properly "tagged" with perfectly accurate metadata describing all the pertinent aspects of the video, without a rich, well-designed and easy to use search interface, the effort expended on such annotations would be wasted and the future utility of those recordings would be inhibited by their inability to be found. AggrGator attempts to address these problems via a simple, easy-to-use web interface that enables the power of crowds to aid in adding metadata and meaningful annotations to online video for the benefit of other viewers. By utilizing a well-known navigational paradigm called "faceted search", AggrGator enables locating and sharing the recordings of precious memories easy and enjoyable, and allows for potential expansion into future areas that will utilize collaboration.