Ah, thanks - that's probably nicer than my current implementation where every
type has to be handled in two places, but I think it's not exactly going to
work for me for a couple of reasons, which I didn't articulate in my initial
post. Firstly, to complicate things a little, that annotation type string,
which that current implementation expects to be a single word, is actually now
a URI. My type system description creation code converts this to a
fully-qualified dotted Java/UIMA type name.
In principle, I guess I could do something similar for a fully-qualified type
name, but in practice guaranteeing uniqueness for a type name converted from a
URL is pretty much impossible if you want human-readability
("http://foo-bar.example.org/qw#first-name"; and
"http://foo-bar.example.org/qw/first-name"; map to the same thing currently, so
I add an arbitrary suffix if there are collisions), which means that the
conversion is lossy, even if practically this would almost certainly not occur.
Secondly, I guess my current hard-coded solution for managing the types implies
that the set of types is stable enough that it would be feasible to implement
most of them manually, with the unknown item fallback. However, this was in
fact a quick-and-dirty solution for a demo, and I'm no longer convinced that
manual static implementations of *any* leaf annotation types is the Right Thing
To Do, due to various considerations such as the fact that these types are
stored dynamically within the web service and are really properties of a
particular data set which is being exposed, rather than part of the defined API
of the web service.
Thanks again,
Andy
On 31/03/2014, at 3:50 PM, Hugo Mougard wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I won't address the type system description part, but about the collection
> reader, you could make use of reflection to ease the maintenance overhead
> (for example with the guava library. The idea would be to autodetect if types
> are present in a given package and use them accordingly. The following
> snippet will put in a map the classes that you can use based on a given
> package and the fact that they implement Annotation:
> https://gist.github.com/m09/9885425
>
> You could then use it like so, in the getItemAnnotationForType method:
>
> String annName = annType.replace("-", "").toLowerCase(Locale.English);
> if (annotations.containsKey(annName)) {
> return
> annotations.get(annName).getDeclaredConstructor(JCas.class).newInstance(jcas);
> } else {
> new UnknownItemAnnotation(jcas);
> }
>
> Best,
> Hugo
>
> On 03/31/2014 11:56 AM, Andrew MacKinlay wrote:> Hi,
>>
>> I have a working CollectionReader implementation which converts from a
>> particular web service to UIMA annotations, based primarily on uimaFIT. It
>> works OK, but the problem is that the web service has its own implicit
>> dynamic type system, particularly for document annotations, and that is
>> currently not being well-handled (I can put a 'type' string as a textual
>> feature, but UIMA is not set up to query over these kinds of annotations, as
>> far as I can tell, so it seems suboptimal).
>>
>> I have now written code which can generate a TypeSystemDescription at
>> runtime for the dynamic types based on the web service output. However, I'm
>> not sure how to most sensibly integrate that with my uimaFIT architecture.
>> Does anyone have any ideas? I guess I could stop using uimaFIT altogether -
>> maybe it's not the right solution here, (although I'm also not entirely sure
>> of the best way to handle this in classic UIMA).
>>
>> I'd like to keep using uimaFIT if possible though - many other types,
>> particularly those relating to overall document metadata, are already
>> working very nicely and succinctly with uimaFIT.
>>
>>
>> BTW, the current CollectionReader implementation, which hard-codes handling
>> of some types, and uses the textual string fallback in other cases, can be
>> found at
>> https://bitbucket.org/andymackinlay/uimavlab/src/c178fa9ebf5d5ffcad0249dd165ca44cde8dcefd/src/main/java/com/nicta/uimavlab/ItemListCollectionReader.java?at=default
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Andy
>>
>
>
