Tool Support for the Online Annotation of Sensor Data

The labelling of sensor data with information about the real world, e.g. the activity a human performs, is called annotation. In this paper we perform an analysis of existing live annotation systems and derive the requirements for a general annotation approach. Based on the requirements, we propose a tool support that uses a database schema for the labelling of sensor data. Instead of video logs that are commonly used to add this information after recording, our approach aims at online annotation of the sensor data, i.e. at the moment the observation is made in the real world. Our database schema enables the automatic generation of a user interface that can be used from (human) observers. In difference to many existing annotation tools, our schema includes a possibility to define callback functions that may be used to check the semantic correctness of the annotation. We show that our approach is working with a generated online annotation system in a home environment.