ATHEN is a Java-based desktop application with the vision to be extensible. Therefore, it makes use of the flexible plugin architecture of the eclipse <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="bold">R</hi>ich- <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="bold">C</hi>lient- <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="bold">P</hi>latform (RCP) <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" target="ftn2" n="2" />. Internally, it is built around Apache UIMA, which means incoming data is automatically converted into the UIMA specific Common Analysis Subject (CAS) architecture. Working with UIMA allows the integration of standalone analysis engines, which can be used to preprocess data and speed up manual annotation. The use of Apache Lucene enables ATHEN to create an index comprising documents, as well as their annotations, which results in queries that can answer questions based on text and meta information in real time. With the ability to execute Apache UIMA Ruta one can even create queries of far higher complexity. On top of that, ATHEN features OWL-Support, which allows the definition of an ontological annotation schema in a machine- readable format. Using Apache UIMA internally allows ATHEN to even address more complicated input. Currently ATHEN supports the annotation of image regions, based on user defined polygons.