The advene (annotate dvd, exchange on the net) project is aimed towards communities exchanging discourses (analysis, studies) about audiovisual documents (e.g. movies) in dvd format. this requires that audiovisual content and hypertext facilities be integrated, thanks to annotations providing explicit structures on audiovisual streams, upon which hypervideo documents can be engineered.

the cross-platform advene application allows users to easily create comments and analyses of video documents, through the definition of time-aligned annotations and their mobilisation into automatically-generated or user-written comment views (html documents). annotations can also be used to modify the rendition of the audiovisual document, thus providing virtual montage, captioning, navigation... capabilities. users can exchange their comments/analyses in the form of advene packages, independently from the video itself.

the advene framework provides models and tools allowing to design and reuse annotations schemas; annotate video streams according to these schemas; generate and create stream-time based (mainly video-centred) or user-time based (mainly text-centred) visualisations of the annotations. schemas (annotation- and relation-types), annotations and relations, queries and views can be clustered and shared in units called packages. hypervideo documents are generated when needed, both from packages (for annotation and view description) and dvds (audiovisual streams).