This paper describes the design and implementation of the MATE workbench, a program which provides support for flexible display and editing of XML annotations, and complex querying of a set of linked files. The workbench was designed to support the annotation of XML coded linguistic corpora, but it could be used to annotate any kind of data, as it is not dependent on any particular annotation scheme. Rather than being a general purpose XMLaware editor it is a system for writing specialised editors tailored to a particular annotation task. A particular editor is defined using a transformation language, with suitable display formats and allowable editing operations. The workbench is written in Java, which means that it is platform-independent. This paper outlines the design of the workbench software and compares it with other annotation programs. 1. Introduction The annotation or markup of files with linguistic or other complex information usually requires either human coding or human ..
