ELAN是一个对视频和音频数据的标识进行创建、编辑、可视化和搜索的标注工具，旨在为标识提供声音技术以及对多媒体剪辑进行开发利用。虽然ELAN专门为语言、手语、姿势提供分析，但是，每个人都可以用它来处理多媒体数据，如视频和音频，以便对其进行标识、分析和建档。
IntroductionELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool that allows you to create, edit, visualize and search annotations for video and audio data. It was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with the aim to provide a sound technological basis for the annotation and exploitation of multi-media recordings. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of language, sign language, and gesture, but it can be used by everybody who works with media corpora, i.e., with video and/or audio data, for purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation.
ELAN supports:
display a speech and/or video signals, together with their annotations;
time linking of annotations to media streams;
linking of annotations to other annotations;
unlimited number of annotation tiers as defined by the users;
different character sets;
export as tab-delimited text files;
import and export between ELAN and Shoebox;
search options.