Hi Eddie, Eddie Epstein wrote: >> It doesn't seem intuitive to me that an object reference whose >> underlying object may have been serialized, sent over the network >> or to C++, modified, serialized again and sent back is guaranteed >> to still be valid afterwards. It makes sense that this should >> work when all annotators are local. I don't think it makes sense >> to guarantee this behavior in general. >> > The fact that this works for services and C++ annotators is not by > accident, it is because a lot of effort was put in to make it work.
I know, I wrote the first version of that code (together with Oli Suhre). > At issue here is the vision for UIMA with regards how much flexibility > to have in deploying annotators without affecting application behavior. > > A strong point point for UIMA, particularly with the OASIS standards > work, is that UIMA annotators can be externalized and implemented > in any language. It would be nice if the Apache UIMA implementation > would not penalize applications for using those annotators. > > Eddie > I can see that this point is very important to you. I would have thought that the original point we were debating was pretty minor, and with proper documentation, should cause no problems for anyone. However, I understand you see things differently. It will be interesting to see what repercussions the OASIS standard has on such issues. For example, indexing as we use it today in Apache UIMA is not part of the standard atm. So indexing information is lost in translation. This means that potentially, when a flow includes a call to a OASIS compatible annotator, indexing info and thus annotation iteration will change. Now maybe we will want to change the way indexing works in Apache UIMA in response to this, but I don't see how we can do this while staying backward compatible. I'd be interested to know what your take is on this issue, as you're one of the authors of the initial OASIS submission. (Not to mention type priorities, but I'll be glad to see them go ;-) --Thilo
