Putting things on top of other things: The ZuMult platform for multimodal corpora and its ecosystem

Abstract

We present ZuMult, an open-source platform for multimodal corpora, and its ecosystem. ZuMult has a flexible three-layer architecture that enables integration with different types of backend, and development of frontend applications tailored to the needs of highly diverse user groups. The paper puts a special emphasis on the way that ZuMult is built upon existing best practices, standards and technologies arguing that such an “ecosystem” makes it easier to integrate the technology with different workflows and technical environments.