The Callisto annotation tool was developed to support
linguistic annotation of textual sources for any
Unicode-supported language. The initial development of the
tool by the MITRE Corporation was funded by the
U. S. government. The primary development team
consisted of Chad McHenry, Robyn Kozierok, and Laurel Riek,
with contributions from David Day. Design and interface
guidance was provided by Lisa Ferro, Janet Hitzeman, Marcia
Lazo, Marc Vilain and David Day. The project lead for this
effort was David Day.
Under the auspices of the DARPA TIDES project, MITRE, NIST and the LDC began working together to
define a new annotation formalism and related infrastructure
tools to encourage the interchange of linguistic annotations
on a wide variety of "linguistic signals" (text, audio,
video, multi-modal signals, etc.). The result was ATLAS,
which is an acronym for: Architecture and Tools for
Linguistic Analysis Systems. Callisto is an ATLAS-compliant
annotation tool.
Of course, Atlas is also one of the gods of ancient Greek mythology. Subsequently NIST developed the jATLAS implementation of the ATLAS formalism upon which Callisto is built. In so doing, they defined a new type definition language for ATLAS, which they called MAIA. In Greek mythology, Maia is one of the Pleiades -- the seven daughters of Atlas.
In keeping with this theme we have named our text annotation tool after another Greek mythological figure, Callisto. Callisto consorted with Zeus (after he tricked her by disguising himself as Artemis). Their tryst resulted in a child, Arcas 1, who came to rule Arcadia later in life. Callisto was punished for being Zeus' lover, and was turned into a bear by Hera. Zeus had pity on Callisto falling to this fate, and so transformed her into the constellation Ursa Major (Great Bear), thus allowing her to gain immortality. He gave their child, Arcas 1, to Hermes' mother, Maia, who raised him to adulthood.