Importing and exporting annotations

There are situations where your annotations already exist in an external file. For example, some of the situations include:

• You need to add a large number of annotations to each user (e.g.: gender, age, ethnicity, role, etc).
• You have a large number of log files containing the same avatars and you don't want to type the annotations in everytime.
• You prefer making your annotations in another tool such as Microsoft? Excel?.
• You feel safer knowing all your hard work is in more than one place and cannot be lost due to some obscure software issue :)

It is, in fact, highly recommended that you export your annotations in a file and use the import feature. This is because VWTk is still in beta, which means it probably has problems that haven't been resolved yet.

Both the avatars table as well as chat table allow you to import and export annotations. Just click the button labeled 'Import' or 'Export' and select the file to import from or export to.

The rules for annotations are given below. VWTk is quite strict about these:

• The pipe character '|' must be used as the delimiter.
• The first row must contain column names.
• One of the column names must correspond to the column name of the first column in the table you are trying to import into. VWTk will use data in this column to determine which row the annotations should go to.
• The order of rows or columns does not matter.
• Duplicate column names are not allowed.
• Importing a file will only affect the data that you see in the table. In other words if you are looking at chat for only 2 out of 10 avatars, importing a file with annotations for all 10 avatars will NOT modify the annotations for all 10 avatars. Only the rows that you see in the table will be modified.
• If your file fails to fulfill any of these conditions, VWTk will tell you so and stop the data import. Just because you see an error does not mean your data is corrupted. Don't worry unless VWTk tells you that there is cause for concern.