So what about Adam's suggestion to separate a CAS from a view? What
*is* the difference, conceptually?
If we did separate the interfaces, could we provide a process method
that gets the default view as input?
--Thilo
Eddie Epstein wrote:
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