Hi Andrey, Thank you for the input. Thank you also Hadrian.
With regard to a smaller ctakes, I know that a couple of people (including yours truly) are currently working on trimming some fat. A few areas have been targeted, with the old/huge umls dictionary being at the top of the list. It is deprecated and only used in a few tests. Lvg is also used in a few test configurations, but I am unsure of its necessity. As far as a "ctakes core" ... I have been trying to figure out a smart way to separate the default clinical pipeline modules from others, making the others optional. I already have a pom for clinical that does not include relation, temporal, coref, very importantly ytex ... as those are not part of the default clinical pipeline. One thing that has me halted is figuring out how and where to make a simple mechanism for people to grab the more advanced modules. A while ago I put a project pom in sandbox under "ctakes the api" or something to that effect. It is basically a pom with advanced modules commented out. A developer could start with that pom as their project main, then uncomment modules as needed. It was a first ten-minute attempt at something simple and, while worth a try, not an ideal solution. Another idea that I have been tossing around is separating tests into separate modules. Also possibly "training" into separate modules. It is standard practice to keep parallel src/ and test/ directories in a repository and this kind of follows that thinking. Many of the tests (such as mentioned above) require/use modules and resources that are not actually required to build the source. The same goes for possible examples. I think that the same could be true for training - if not now, perhaps in the future. Again, I am held up on the best way to actually do this, keeping things simple wrt maven and a lack of excess complexity. The last thing that I want to do is make ctakes more difficult to use. Maybe osgi can help the above, but I'm honestly not sure how. If anybody else thinks that it can then I am going to let them handle it. Perhaps I am just jaded. Years ago my previous company had great hopes for osgi and invested a lot of time (=money) into applying it to our applications. Over a million dollars later, the consensus was that osgi couldn't apply to our applications without completely rewriting infrastructure - which was an absolute no-go - and even if it could just be slapped on overnight did nothing for us or our customers. With regard to better logging, I think that James added some more detailed logging for the 4.0 release, and I think that he has a few more areas slated. There are more logging statements that exist at finer levels than "info" and can be seen by changing the log4j configuration. As for changing the entire codebase to slf4j, I may be alone but I'm not sure how that alone will make ctakes any more transparent. With regard to ctakes setup having some quirks ... yup. Known issue to a lot of us. Documentation was improved for the 4.0 release, but "run anywhere" documentation is difficult to both create and maintain. Several ideas have been tossed around including installation scripts, an "environment/setup investigation/confirmation" gui or something like a running faq/blog on nothing but installation problems and solutions. Sean -----Original Message----- From: Andrey Kurdumov [mailto:kant2...@googlemail.com] Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2017 1:52 AM To: cTakes developers list Subject: Re: Proposed improvements [EXTERNAL] Just want to note that ASF PMC want to make GitHub primary repository and Apache servers secondary soon. Regarding improvements: I personally want better support for embedding. Right now cTakes distribution comes with LVG and UMLS dictionary and size of cTakes thus become very. I would like to have (and work on it) much leaner distribution, let's name it cTakes Core, which will just provide cTakes executable without need for data. Right now I have constantly rip-off that data after cTakes build which slow down my build significantly. Personally I support Hadrian initiative to have better logging since cTakes setup has some quirks which could be faster resolved by better logging. 2017-06-23 17:38 GMT+06:00 Miller, Timothy < timothy.mil...@childrens.harvard.edu>: > Thanks Hadrian, I hadn't heard of OSEHRA but it looks interesting and > like something where we should be making people aware of cTAKES! > > svn vs. git -- I'm with you on preferring git, but not by so much that > it's worth spending time on an argument if it turns into an argument > :). As far as I know we've never really had a discussion about it. > It's probably getting to the point where new developers have _only_ > used git and would find it a complete roadblock to use svn but for me > it's just a mild annoyance. > > All others you mentioned -- if you are willing to contribute a patch > we are happy to accept one-off contributions, and we are also > interested in growing the developer community with people who are > interested in contributing regularly over time. > > Tim > > ________________________________________ > From: Hadrian Zbarcea <hzbar...@gmail.com> > Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2017 9:14 PM > To: dev@ctakes.apache.org > Subject: Proposed improvements [EXTERNAL] > > Last week I presented at the OSEHRA Summit about ActiveMQ (and a few > other projects) and the ASF in general. > > I was surprised that most didn't know much about the ASF and more > importantly that nobody knew about cTakes, the only (directly) > healthcare related project at the ASF. There was no cTakes talk at > ApacheCon in Miami, but at OSEHRA, which is all about healthcare we > should have had a presence. I will probably submit a talk for next > year, but until then, because I think I created a bit of interest in > cTakes I went to build cTakes myself and try a few things. > > Some of my findings are: > * test failures with openjdk; granted the docs mention oracle jdk as a > prerequisite, but think it's easy to support openjdk > * use of svn vs git; this is a debatable topic, but by now everybody > and their uncles are on git so moving to git (which I'd recommend) > would probably forster adoption (yes, I know about the github mirror) > * no support for OSGi, many large players use it > * improvements in logging could go a long way, starting with moving to > slf4j > > Suggesting improvements imply that I volunteer to do a good chunk of > the work, but before that I'm interested more in how much the > community would welcome such improvements. I am curious what are > considered more low hanging fruits, for the more controversial topics > we could take them to [discuss] threads. Because every community has > its own culture and I am not that familiar with the cTakes one, > although I went through the mail archives, I thought a prudent first step > would be to start with this. > > Feedback appreciated, > Hadrian >
