The video annotation software is part of a cooperation between the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt and the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal. Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) the project aims to preserve the heritage of the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch who passed away in 2009. In order to preserve the knowledge and materials, accumulated over decades, and to make it easily available, the foundation has started to digitize all available information.

Because of the nature of the data that has been gathered over the years, the archive is based on semantic web technology and the information is kept and augmented inside a triple store database. From a design view, one of the challenges of the project was to understand dance theatre and to learn the terminology used. This proved to be especially interesting as the terminology even differs across the departments of the company.

For the video annotator, there were several rounds of prototyping to understand materials, data sources and annotation processes. Final interaction tests were conducted with users on a web based prototype. While a video is being played back, time spans can be marked on a timeline and comments can be added to each time span. The final goal is to make information from within videos available to (full text) search in order to access data more quickly and conveniently than with analog video sources.