What's the BARN?
The BARN project develops open-source software tools that support the creation of annotated sound libraries in a way that transforms recording collections into rich and accesible scientific data resources. A typical application is the evaluation of biological diversity through the processing and analysis of long-term environmental recordings.
BARN combines computer-assisted annotation (through detection and classification of relevant recording segments) with web-based collaborative human review to achieve efficient high-quality annotation of large sound collections. Through BARN, users can maintain and extensively and extensibly annotate sound collections in support of their research, with collaboration and data-sharing of results built-in.
Look in Sounds to get an idea of what this looks like, or look in Projects to see some projects currently using BARN.
Who's behind the BARN?
The BARN project emerged at the Bioacoustics Research Program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to support our ever growing sound annotation and collaboration efforts.
BARN was created by Harold Figueroa as part of the XBAT project while addressing the scaling and networkability of XBAT annotation tools.
What's in the BARN?
barn.xbat.org
As part of the BARN project we host our server and web application as a service to the bioacoustics research community. You can sign up for an account to start annotating your sounds, collaborating, and sharing your work.BARN API
The BARN architecture offers simple programmatic access to BARN data through a REST application programming interface (API). For example, the request
http://barn.xbat.org/sounds.xmlwill respond with an XML representation of the list of available sound resources. Similarly, other addresses will respond with representations of a variety of BARN sound annotation resources. Using this approach users and developers can create simple scripts and full applications that read and write BARN data.Look in the API section to learn about this interface through a tutorial and reference, or experiment with the API in the console application.
BARN server and clients
The BARN project provides server and client reference implementations documenting and supporting the database schemas and BARN API.
Learn more about these and access the code through the Developer section.
