Hi Marshall, thanks for the pointer to GraphQL. I think I'll have a look into that in relation to the annotation editors I'm working on. We are looking there for a nice solution to allow building custom UIs without having to do backend coding.
> Some time ago, we added JSON serialization to UIMA, with some complexities > around enabling accurate representation of the complete complexities of > interlinked UIMA features. Yep :) And I regularly get asked by people for a reader for this data because at the moment UIMA can only write JSON. For the purpose of communicating with a UI, the JSON format provided by UIMA probably is way too complex, but I think for people who wish to exchange data with UIMA it would be very convenient if there would also be a reader. JSON is the new XML... > It strikes me that users frequently are interested in much simpler kinds of > things, and sometimes roll their own simple json serializers of some small > part > of the CAS. ... and not even of the entire CAS but maybe only of parts of it, e.g. restricted to particular annotation types, restricted to particular parts of a document or otherwise. > I'm wondering if we could figure out and implement some general kind of > graphQL > support, to enable users to easily spec-out and retrieve what they wanted, and > whether or not the user community would find that of interest? It seems to me that the UV3 select API goes a long way already. Maybe it is straightforward to expose it via a GraphQL API? Should UIMA actually implement some kind of CAS server with a GraphQL remote API? Not sure. My intuition from working on the annotation tools would be that at least in that applications scenario, there is so much extra functionality specific to a particular annotation tool (e.g. coloring, displaying of validation warnings, etc.) that I'd probably want to write my own GraphQL wrapper anyway which might not directly access the CAS but maybe some intermediate representation. So I think it would be a great idea to add a reader for the existing UIMA JSON format. I also think it would be nice to switch from Velocity to something more modern for the UIMA website ;) Cheers, -- Richard
