Hi all, at the LREC conference there were some brief discussions about pushing for a "standard" typesystem (and maybe some more things) to make combining UIMA annotators from different sources easier.
While it is great that UIMA itself is a generic framework that is completely agnostic to the tasks it is used for, there are many users that want to be able to use existing analysis engines. Currently they are forced to either choose a specific component collection (DKpro, cTakes, JCORE, OpenNLP, ...) or write adapters to convert type systems. There was agreement between some of us (Richard, Peter, etc.) that it would be very helpful to guide component developers towards a shared type system to make adoption of UIMA easier and avoid fragmentation. Here are some suggestions on how to proceed: - go all in and have the UIMA project provide a type system (in the UIMA namespace) - develop an independent (unofficial) type system that is recommended on the UIMA web site - develop an unofficial type system and gather endorsements from a variety of institutions (UPF, UKP, JulieLab, Averbis, ...) so as to promote this type system. I think (and there was initial agreement on this) that DKpro's type system would be a good starting point (with some fixes). So, how does everybody feel about this, and how do we get started? Best, Jens
