Spatiotemporal Annotation: Interaction between Standards and other Formats

Standards and the need for standards, for example for annotation purposes, only emerge after a period of time. Before, people just did what they thought was right. This may have resulted in large amounts of data in a format that in the end did not turn out to be on speaking terms with the (new) standard. This format may even have become a de facto standard for a particular language or in a particular domain. In this paper we discuss an approach for situations in which ISOcat is used to mediate between such formats. Another task for ISOcat is to indicate the possible re-use of the output of semantic annotation X using format Y for a new annotation Z. These possibilities are to a large extent determined by the compatibility of the (definitions of the) data categories used in both. The spatiotemporal annotation schema STEx, as used in the SoNaR-corpus, is central to this paper. Its input consists of other (semantic) annotations. In the TTNWW-project1 STEx is related to relevant standards, like ISO-Time ML, and state-of-the-art formats, like Spatial ML. We describe which conditions should be met and how ISOcat can offer a helping hand.