What is the best practice for passing runtime meta-data about the analysis to individual annotators when running UIMA-AS or UIMA-DUCC services? An example would be a database identifier for an analysis of many documents. I can't pass this in as parameters to the aggregate analysis engine running as a service, because I don't know what that identifier is until runtime (when the application calls the service).
I used to put such information in the JCas, having the CollectionReader implementation do all this work. But I am striving to have a more lightweight CollectionReader... The application can obviously write metadata to a database or other shared resource, but then it becomes incumbent on the AnalysisEngine to access that shared resources over the network (slow). Any advice appreciated, -John
