Distributed operation

As stated, EUDICO is intended to be used in a distributed fashion. In general, three types of resources are used by EUDICO client: corpus data resources, corpus media resources and software tool resources. The aim is that each resource can either be available locally on the client machine, in the client's local area network or elsewhere on the internet. It should be possible to tranparantly use any mix of local and remote resources.

Some scenario's:

• A number of users from all over the world can simultaneously work on different tiers of the same transcription. Tiers and transcriptions are stored on one central server. Each user can view media data and all tiers in one set of time synchronized viewers.
• A user can view a transcription from a remote corpus and decide to add his/her own annotations. These annotations are stored locally, but can be viewed completely integrated with the rest of the remote transcription. After review, the administrator of the remote corpus may decide that the local annotations can become part of the corpus.
• A user can define a search operation on selected data from two differently formatted corpora on different locations. Results can be inspected side by side in a uniform fashion.
• A developer can make a new tool or a new version of a tool available to the user group. Each user can then run it directly from the developer's server. No need for any installation.
• ....

In general, we foresee that a number of resource and tools centers will emerge leading to a universe of distributed services: one server is offering software components and another is offering annotation and/or media data. For scientists these types of usage can have enormous implications: scientists with restricted resources can now have easy access to state of the art technology and language resources. Completely new forms of remote collaboration will become possible.

The following figure schematically depicts a cooperation between two users at different locations.: