This is a Fork from the official (Opencast Annotation Tool)[www.github.com/opencast/annnotationtool], that have several modification in their inner workings from the Upstream material. The most important change, this version is meant to work only with the (Ilias plugin made by Steuer-Reimann)[www.github.com/steuer-riemann/opencast].
The differences from the Upstream version and this version are:
- Uses the administration node instead of the presentation node
- There are no calls to the API
- The ilias plugin gives directly the media address instead to be search by the Annotation Tool
- Instead ACL lists from opencast to give access to the annotation tool, is Ilias that creates a key to give access to the Annotation Tool.
- Build and install .Jar files like in the official release
- In Ilias plugin, enable the option "Use Annotation Token Security" in the Ilias plugin security options
- Make sure that the Annotation Channel metadata from opencast gives a HLS (Recognized to be a .m3u8 file)
- The annotation Tool can give an Not authorized error if the user in Ilias is different as the user logged in opencast, please make sure that you are log-off or logged with the same user in Ilias before to try.
Important note: As today is only meant to be use with HLS media, in upcomming updates it will be allowed to use any type of media.
The authentication method to the annotation tool differs totaly from the upstream channel, this fork utilizes what is called hash based security between Ilias and opencast to ensure that the user in Ilias has the authorization and the correct rights in the Annotation Tool.
This authentication method starts in Ilias, that generate a Hash that is send to the Annotation Tool. The Annotation Tool compares this hash with the one generated by itself using data retrieved from Opencast.
Depending of the set hash, it gives to the user the administrative role or the user role.
This fork, does not make any communication between the external API or throught the search API or any other API. Instead, is Ilias who send the media information throught the web address.
The information send from Ilias to the Anotation tool is:
- Mediapackage ID
- Media URL
The Opencast Annotation Tool (aka Annotating Academic Video by Entwine) is a video annotation service that is suitable for research, teaching or learning.
The software consists of two parts:
- The frontend component, containing the annotation webapp.
- The Opencast Backend modules, that need to be integrated into an Opencast installation.
Unlike for Opencast, the community surrounding the Opencast Annotation Tool is relatively small, and the resources for its development and maintenance limited. With that in mind it makes little sense to try to support multiple versions of the tool simultaneously. The situation also doesn't really warrant any formal and/or regular release cycle.
As a result, this project follows kind of a rolling release strategy:
We try our best to have the master branch on GitHub
always contain a working version of the software.
Every push to master thus constitutes a release,
versioned by an up-to-the-second timestamp,
and the appropriate git commit hash.
You can get to the source code of any particular such release
by checking out the corresponding commit in git.
Our CI setup builds each such push and publishes the resulting Maven artifacts to our GitHub hosted repository.
With the same motivation of a smaller community and fewer resources,
we decided to only support the currently supported Opencast versions, by default,
with a strong preference towards the newer versions.
We reserve the right to further restrict this commitment at any point
should the maintenance burden prove too high.
We also try our best to be compatible with Opencast develop,
seeing as how this is going to be our next "premium support" version
in at most six months time. 😉
The instruction on how to install the Annotation Tool in Opencast can be found here
A general documentation including the REST endpoints, the architecture etc. can be found here.
- Entwine (now Extron)
- SWITCH
- Claudio Beffa
- Rüdiger Rolf, rrolf@uni-osnabrueck.de, Phone: +49 541 969 6511