Annomarket

Annomarket was an EU FP7 project with the goal to revolutionise the text annotation market, by delivering an affordable, open marketplace for pay-as-you-go, cloud-based extraction resources and services, in multiple languages. The project is driven by a %commercially-dominated consortium, from 3 EU countries and with 41% of the budget assigned to SMEs.

The key differentiating feature of Annomarket is its open marketplace concept. In addition, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model reduces the complexity of deployment, maintenance, customisation and sharing of text processing resources and services, making them affordable to SMEs – both end users and resource providers. The main beneficiaries will be the SME providers of text analysis resources and services, who will be able to deploy their custom components/applications and receive revenue via the Annomarket marketplace. There will be a mixture of paid-for proprietary resources and services and free open-source ones, in different languages. Annomarket will also promote customisation and re-targeting to new vertical domains and languages. The open-source nature of the underlying infrastructure will encourage the participation of an already existing strong developer community and enable easy deployment on private and public cloud infrastructures. Pricing will be transparent (based on data volumes and API calls) and the business model self-sustainable.

The techniques will be generic with many business applications, e.g. large-volume multi-lingual information management, business intelligence, social media monitoring, customer relations management. The project will also benefit society and ordinary citizens by enabling affordable enrichment of government data archives and health-related web content. The marketplace architecture will be refined and evaluated with early adopters from our focus group, covering these vertical domains, in five target languages.

The AnnoMarket project ended in 2014 but many of the ideas developed in the project have been taken forward into the H2020 European Language Grid project.