> > Please help me here, I'm not really up-to-date with the whole view/Sofa > concept. Can't we provide a process method that is fully backward > compatible, without having to call this? I think that would be the > preferable solution. > > Also, I think it's premature to look to the OASIS work for guidance. > Let's follow our own good sense until the standard is at a stage where > we feel confident it won't change much. > > --Thilo >
Thilo, all the work on view/Sofas to-date has kept the old process method signatures, as you suggest. Unfortunately this backward compatibility causes substantial complexity in the documentation and conceptualization for many users. The desire to make the proposed simplification predates the OASIS work. The simplest view of CAS data is as a flat list of feature structures. Many annotators need only work with subsets of this list, hence the mechanism of creating a "view" whose indexes are restricted to a subset. In essence, the OASIS perspective is that asking all annotator writers to understand the concept of a view as CAS subset is better than trying to hide this fact for "single-view" annotator writers and complicating the world for everyone else. Eddie
