This paper deals with the interpretation of biomedical multivariate time series for extracting typical scenarios. This task is known to be difficult, due to the temporal nature of the data at hand, and to the context-sensitive aspect of data interpretation, which hamper the formulation of a priori knowledge about the kind of patterns to detect and their interrelations. A new way to tackle this problem is proposed, based on a collaborative approach between a human and a machine by means of specific annotations. Two grounding principles, namely autonomy and knowledge discovery, support the co-construction of successive abstraction levels for data interpretation. A multi-agent system is proposed to implement effectively these two principles. Respiratory time series data (Flow, Paw) have been explored with our system for patient/ventilator asynchronies characterization studies