Hi James,

<taking Apache UIMA hat off, putting UKP Lab hat on>

I'm working on the WebAnno (and DKPro Core) project. Thanks for checking it out 
and providing feedback!

On 16.11.2014, at 13:08, James Kitching <[email protected]> wrote:

> I had hoped that I could use webanno for this task however webanno does not 
> allow the direct import of UIMA components or UIMA output.

WebAnno [1] is an annotation tool. It's scope is not the building or running of 
pipelines.

WebAnno can quite immediately consume XMIs created with the DKPro Core [2] 
collection of UIMA components, since the built-in annotation types of WebAnno 
are modelled after the DKPro Core types. Actually, all import/export filters in 
WebAnno are UIMA components from DKPro Core.

WebAnno is not meant to be a universal XMI/CAS editor. It is meant to be a 
user-friendly annotation tool. However, we internally use the UIMA CAS to 
represent annotations.

To visualizes UIMA annotations in WebAnno, they need to be mapped to WebAnnos 
(cf. brat's) interaction paradigms. To this end, WebAnno supports three 
specific type-system design patterns (aka "layer types"): span, relation, and 
chain.
A "span" is basically a UIMA "Annotation". A "relation" is an annotation with 
two features pointing to a "span" type. A "chain" is basically a variation of a 
linked list. Additional primitive features are also supported.

If you want to use WebAnno with existing UIMA data, you can try this:

- define custom annotation layers in WebAnno that closely resemble the data you 
wish to interface with
- export the layer definition as JSON
- edit the JSON file and change the type names "webanno.custom.XXX" into 
whatever these types are called in your existing UIMA type sytem
- create a new project
- import the modified JSON layer configuration

For basic type system designs, this should work ok.

Cheers,

-- Richard

[1] https://code.google.com/p/webanno/
[2] https://code.google.com/p/dkpro-core-asl/

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