Help - Multiple Annotators setup

Hello,
We seem to be stuck. We understand 1 personal license allows unlimited annotators. Need is to have multiple (10+) annotators, each annotating a separate document simultaneously. However, we are unable to get more than one annotator using Prodigy at the same time. The way it was setup each annotator has to remote-access log into the server. But basic Microsoft server set-up in AWS permits 2 users. Even with this setup 2 annotators cannot work at the same time.
How should it be setup so that 10 annotators can work simultaneously on a project setup on the 1 person license?
Can the annotators access prodigy via their web browser without remote desktop login to the server?
Thank you

Hi! Annotators who only label the data typically only need access to the Prodigy web app – so you wouldn't have to give them any remote server access? You'd just need to start the annotation tasks for them, serve the annotation UI on separate hosts/ports and give the annotators access to the URL of the respective instance.

Thank you for the very helpful information.
So, this is 1 project. Each annotator is tasked with 100 documents each (total approximately 1,000+ documents to be annotated).

What is considered an annotation task... that will require a separate host or port?

10 (1 for each annotator)?
1,000 (for each individual document)? or
1 for the one project?

Ah, sorry if the terminology I used was confusing! What I meant was the session/instance/process. There are generally two ways you could set this up and it depends on your project, annotators and how you want to set up the workflow:

  1. Start one Prodigy process one a given host/port per annotator and save the annotations to separate datasets. For example, on port 8080, you start the Prodigy server with 100 documents and save to annotations_andrew, on port 8081 you start Prodigy with the next 100 documents and save to annotations_ines, and so on.
    • Pros: very straightforward, easy to keep a separation between the work, no problem to update a model in the loop because every annotator has their own model instance and there are no conflicts
    • Cons: you have to run multiple processes (could be automated with a script but there is more going on), it's harder to share state between the sessions because process 1 doesn't know what process 2 has queued up
  2. Start Prodigy once and have multiple annotators access the same process using named sessions. For example, you would be accessing the app with ?session=andrew.
    • Pros: you only have to start one process, it's easier to send out examples to a different session based on shared state
    • Cons: can be harder to reason about because there's more state and more things influencing each other, harder to share a model in the loop because you have multiple people potentially updating it in different directions
3 Likes

Thank you!