(Anno) Tator Online: A Web Application for Exploration and Curation of Underwater Video and Imagery

Using modern web technologies, we will build an application that can be used to explore, enrich, and evaluate the wealth of underwater video and imagery being collected by NOAA and its partners. Existing data portals are primarily for text based or keyword search, and for viewing of existing data, lacking the ability for rich interaction, visualization of metadata, and adding new types of annotations. Similarly, existing annotation tools are not meant to be responsive web clients with lightweight footprints for video playback and image viewing of large corpora of data. The application, which we have named (Anno) Tator Online, will enable scaleable access to vast amounts of video and imagery assets, as well as the ability to curate subsets based on image searching of rich metadata, algorithm results, or other criteria. This will enable new paradigms of use for existing data that will unlock the benefit of the NOAA mission for a host of public use cases (e.g. building image sets of certain species for school lesson plans). The seamless integration of data curation, annotation, metadata enrichment, and algorithm pipelines make Tator Online a unique tool with invaluable benefits.