Dear users of UIMA, the JULIE Lab of the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena has a long standing tradition of creating UIMA components for our needs. We have been publishing our components under the JCoRe brand for quite some years now. The components themselves may be found in code form on our GitHub organization (https://github.com/JULIELab <https://github.com/JULIELab>; https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-base <https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-base>; https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-projects <https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-projects>). The compiled component artifacts are distributed via Maven. A lot of components in JCoRe focus on biomedical NLP. But there are also components of general value and some other-focused components like our DTA reader, for example.
The latest addition to these repositories are the JCoRe Pipeline Builder and Pipeline Runner programs (https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-pipeline-modules <https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-pipelines>; https://zenodo.org/record/4066619#.X3sPVS8Rp-U) which facilitate the creation of JCoRe pipelines tremendously as I find, as long as one is using JCoRe components or adds one’s own components in a manual fashion to the local pipeline component repository, which is possible. Please find below a short description of the main components offered here. A more detailed description can be found in the GitHub’s README.md file. For further questions, please use the project’s issue tracker. The Pipeline Builder ————————— On first start, the pipeline builder directly connects to the JCoRe GitHub repositories and scans them for JSON files that disclose meta data about the available components. For this purpose, most JCoRe components contain the “component.meta” file which, despite the “.meta” extension, is a JSON file carrying the name and the nature of the component (reader, multiplier, ae or consumer) as well as the Maven coordinates for the software artifacts. Thus, one of the strong points of the tool is the direct connection of description and running code. The user is then shown a menu where she must select the JCoRe repositories to employ on first startup. Afterwards, a menu is offered to select components, configure them, rearrange them, select another version of the Maven artifact and more. One configuration highlight is the possibility to deactivate components. It is thus possible to keep components with different configurations and switch them on or off, for example. The pipeline can be stored which causes the specified directory to be populated by UIMA descriptors, pipeline meta information, a library directory containing the Maven artifacts and more. The Pipeline Runner ————————— The pipeline runner requires a configuration file in XML format. Upon execution of the program with a non-existing file as parameter, an empty configuration file will be written instead than can be used as a template for the new configuration. The runner supports CPEs and UIMA DUCC. Thus, the configuration contains one passage for both. But you will only want to keep one. For example, to run a pipeline as a CPE, the configuration must contain the path of the pipeline created with the pipeline builder at the very least. Optionally, the maximum heap size and the number of threads to use can also be specified. Please feel free to try out the programs and let me know - preferably through the issue tracker (https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-pipeline-modules/issues <https://github.com/JULIELab/jcore-pipeline-modules/issues>) - if you have an issues. I hope that someone will find this useful. Best regards, Erik Faessler, JCoRe Maintainer at JULIE Lab, FSU Jena
