UIMA Tools Guide and Reference

Here's how to launch this tool on a descriptor contained in the examples. This presumes you have installed the examples as described in the SDK Installation and Setup chapter.

A new AE descriptor file may be created by selecting the File → New → Other... menu. This brings up the following dialog:

If the user then selects UIMA and Analysis Engine Descriptor File, and clicks the Next > button, the following dialog is displayed. We will cover creating other kinds of components later in the documentation.

After entering the appropriate parent folder and file name, and clicking Finish, an initial AE descriptor file is created with the given name, and the descriptor is opened up within the Component Descriptor Editor.

At this point, the display inside the Component Descriptor Editor is the same whether one started by creating a new AE descriptor, as in the preceding paragraph, or one merely opened a previously created AE descriptor from, say, the Package Explorer view. We show a previously created AE in the figure below:

To see all the information shown in the main editor pane with less scrolling, double click the title tab to toggle between the “full screen” and normal views.

It is possible to set the Component Descriptor Editor as the default editor for all .xml files by going to Window → Preferences, and then selecting File Associations on the left, and *.xml on the right, and finally by clicking on Component Descriptor Editor, the Default button and then OK. If AE and Type System descriptors are not the primary .xml files you work with within the Eclipse environment, we recommend not setting the Component Descriptor Editor as your default editor for all .xml files. To open an .xml file using the Component Descriptor Editor, if the Component Descriptor Editor is not set as your default editor, right click on the file in the Package Explorer, or other navigational view, and select Open With → Component Descriptor Editor. This choice is remembered by Eclipse for subsequent open operations.

The Component Descriptor Editor follows a standard Eclipse paradigm for these kinds of editors. There are several pages in the editor; each one can be selected, one at a time, by clicking on the bottom tabs. The last page contains the actual XML source file being edited, and is displayed as plain text.

The same set of tabs appear at the bottom of each page in the Component Descriptor Editor. The Component Descriptor Editor uses this “multi-page editor” paradigm to give the user a view of conceptually distinct portions of the Descriptor metadata in separate pages. At any point in time the user may click on the Source tab to view the actual XML source. The Component Descriptor Editor is, in a way, just a fancy GUI for editing the XML. The tabs provide quick access to the following pages: Overview, Aggregate, Parameters, Parameter Settings, Type System, Capabilities, Indexes, Resources, and Source. We discuss each of these pages in turn.

1.3.1. Adjusting the display of pages

Most pages in the editor have a “sash” bar. This is a light gray bar which separates sub-sections of the page. This bar can be dragged with the mouse to adjust how the display area is split between the two sash panes. You can also change the orientation of the Sash so it splits vertically, instead of horizontally, by clicking on the small icons at the top right of the page that look like this:

All of the sections on a page have subtitles, with an indicator to the left which you can click to collapse or expand that particular section. Collapsing sections can sometimes be useful to free up screen area for other sections.

Normally, the first page displayed in the Component Descriptor Editor is the Overview page (the name of the page is shown in the GUI panel at the top left). If there is an error reading and parsing the source, the Source page is shown instead, giving you the opportunity to correct the problem. For many components, the Overview page contains three sections: Implementation Details, Runtime Information and overall Identification Information.

For primitive Analysis Engines, Flow Controllers or Collection Processing components, the Aggregate page is not used. For aggregate engines, the page looks like this:

On the left we see a list of component engines, and on the right information about the flow. If you hover the mouse over an item in the list of component engines, that engine's description meta data will be shown. If you right-click on one of these items, you get an option to open that delegate descriptor in another editor instance. Any changes you make, however, won't be seen until you close and reopen the editor on the importing file.

Engines can be added to the list on the left by clicking the Add button at the bottom of the Component Engine section. This brings up the following dialog:

This dialog lets you select a descriptor from your workspace, or browse the file system to select a descriptor.

You can specify that the import should be by Name (the name is looked up using both the Project's class path, and DataPath), or by location. If it is by name, it may contain part of the path within the name. For instance, if the file name picked is c:/project/subproject/src/com/company/prod/xyz.xml, and the class path includes c:/project/subproject/src, the name in the descriptor will be “com.company.prod.xyz”. If it is by location, the file reference is converted to a relative reference if possible, in the descriptor.

The final selection at the bottom tells whether or not the selected engine(s) should automatically be added to the end of the flow section (the right section on the Aggregate page). The OK button does not become activated until a descriptor file is selected.

To remove an analysis engine from the component engine list simply select an engine and click the Remove button, or press the delete key. If the engine is already in the flow list you will be warned that deletion will also delete the specified engine from this list.

1.5.3. Adding remote Analysis Engines

There are two ways to add remote engines: add an existing descriptor, which specifies a remote engine (just as if you were adding a non-remote engine) or use the Add Remote button which will create a remote descriptor, save it, and then import it, all in one operation. The Add Remote button enables you to easily specify the information needed to create a Service Client descriptor for a remote AE - one that runs on a different computer connected over the network. The Service Client descriptor is described in Section 2.7, “Service Client Descriptors” in UIMA References. The Add Remote button creates this descriptor, saves it as a file in the workspace, and imports it into the aggregate.

Of course, if you already have a Service Client descriptor, you can add it to the set of delegates, just like adding other kinds of analysis engines.

After clicking on Add Remote, the following dialog is displayed:

To define a remote service you specify the Service Kind, Protocol Service Type, URI and Key. You can also specify a Timeout in milliseconds, used by the SOAP service, and a VNS Host and Port used by the Vinci Service. Just like when one adds an engine from the file system, you have the option of adding the engine to the end of the flow. The Component Descriptor Editor currently only supports Vinci and SOAP services using this dialog.

Remote engines are added to the descriptor using the <import ... > syntax. The information you specify here is saved in the Eclipse project as a file, using a generated name, <key-name>.xml, where <key-name> is the name you listed as the Key. Because of this, the key-name must be a valid file name. If you want a different name, you can change the path information in the dialog box.

1.5.5. Finding Analysis Engines by searching

The next button that appears between the component engine list and the flow list is the Find AE button. When this button is pressed the following dialog is displayed, which allows one to search for AEs by name, by input or output types, or by a combination of these criteria. This function searches the existing Eclipse workspace for matching *.xml descriptor source files; it does not look inside Jar files.

The search automatically adds a “match any characters” - style (*) wildcard at the beginning and end of anything entered. Thus, if person is specified for an output type, a “*person*” search is performed. Such a search would match such things as “my.namespace.person” and “person.governmentOfficial.” One can search in all projects or one particular project. The search does an implicit and on all fields which are left non-blank.

1.5.6. Component Engine Flow

The UIMA SDK currently supports three kinds of sequencing flows: Fixed, CapabilityLanguageFlow (see the section called “Capability Language Flow” in UIMA References ), and user-defined. The first two require specification of a linear flow sequence; this linear flow sequence can also be read by a user-defined flow controller (what use is made of it is up to the user-defined flow controller). The Component Engine Flow section allows specification of these items.

The pull-down labeled Flow Kind picks between the three flow models. When the user-defined flow is selected, the Browse and Search buttons become enabled to let you pick the flow controller XML descriptor to import.

The key name value is set automatically from the XML descriptor being imported, and enables parameters to be overridden for that descriptor (see following sections).

The Up and Down buttons to the right in the Flow section are activated when an engine in the flow is selected. The Up button moves the selected engine up one place in the execution order, and down moves the selected engine down one place in the execution order. Remember that engines can appear multiple times in the flow (or not at all).

There are two pages for parameters: the first one is where parameters are defined, and the second one is where the parameter settings are configured. The first page is the Parameter Definition page and has two alternatives, depending on whether or not the descriptor is an Aggregate or not. We start with a description of parameter definitions for Primitive engines, CAS Consumers, Collection Readers, CAS Initializers, and Flow Controllers. Here is an example:

The first checkbox at the top simplifies things if you are not using Parameter Groups (see the following section for a discussion of groups). In this case, leave the check box unchecked. The main area shows a list of parameter definitions. Each parameter has a name, which must be unique for this Analysis Engine. The other three attributes specify whether the parameter can have a single or multiple values (an array of values), whether it is Optional or Mandatory, and what the value type it can hold (String, Integer, Float, and Boolean).

In addition to using the buttons on the right to edit this information, you can double-click a parameter to edit it, or remove (delete) a selected parameter by pressing the delete key. Use the Add button to add a new parameter to the list.

Parameters have an additional description field, which you can specify when you add or edit a parameter. To see the value of the description, hover the mouse over the item, as shown in the picture below:

1.6.1. Using groups

The group concept for parameters arose from the observation that sets of parameters were sometimes associated with different configuration needs. As an example, you might have an Analysis Engine which needed different configuration based on the language of a document.

To use groups, you check the “Use Parameter Groups” box. When you do this, you get the ability to add groups, and to define parameters within these groups. You also get a capability to define “Common” parameters, which are parameters which are defined for all groups. Here is a screen shot showing some parameter groups in use:

You can see the “<Common>” parameters as well as two different sets of groups.

The Default Group is an optional specification of what Group to use if the parameter is not available for the group requested.

The Search strategy specifies what to do when a parameter is not available for the group requested. It can have the values of None, language_fallback, or default_fallback. These are more fully described in the section Section 2.4.1.3, “Configuration Parameter Declaration” in UIMA References .

Groups are added using the Add Group button. Once added, they can be edited or removed, using the buttons to the right, or the standard gestures for editing (double-clicking the item) and removing (pressing the delete key after an item is selected). Removing a group removes all the parameter definitions in the group. If you try and remove the “<Common>” group, it just removes the parameters in the group.

Each entry for a group in the table specifies one or more group names. For example, the highlighted entry above, specifies two groups: “myNewGroup2” and “mg3”. The parameter definition underneath is considered to be in both groups.

1.6.2. Parameter declarations for Aggregates

Aggregates declare parameters which always must override a parameter setting for a component making up the aggregate. They do this using the version of this page which is shown when the descriptor is an Aggregate; here's an example:

There is an additional panel shown (on the right) which lists all of the components by their key names, and shows for each of them their defined parameters. To add a new override for one or more of these parameters to the aggregate, select the component parameter you wish to override and push the Create Override button (or, you can just double-click the component parameter). This will automatically add a parameter of the same name (by default – you can change the name if you like) to the aggregate, putting it into the same group(s) (if groups are being used in the component – this is required), and setting the properties of the parameter to match those of the component (this is required).

Note

If the name of the parameter being added already is in use in the aggregate, and the parameters are not compatible, a new parameter name is generated by suffixing the name with a number. If the parameters are compatible, the selected component parameter is added to the existing aggregate parameter, as an additional override. If you don't want this behavior, but want to have a new name generated in this case, push the Create non-shared Override button instead, or hold down the “shift” key when double clicking the component parameter.

The required / optional setting in the aggregate parameter is set to match that of the parameter being overridden. You may want to make an optional delegate parameter required. You can do this by changing that value manually in the source editor view.

In the above example, the user has just double-clicked the “TypeNames” parameter in the “NameRecognizer” component. This added that parameter to this aggregate under the “<Not in any group>” section – since it wasn't part of a group.

Once you have added a parameter definition to the aggregate, you can use the buttons on the right side of the left panel to add additional overrides or remove parameters or their overrides. You can also remove groups; removing a group is like removing all the parameter definitions in the group.

In addition to adding one parameter at a time from a component, you can also add all the parameters for a group within a component, or all the parameters in the component, by selecting those items.

If you double-click (or push Create Override) the “<Common>” group or a parameter in the <Common> group in a component, a special group is created in the Aggregate consisting of all of the groups in that component, and the overriding parameter (or parameters) are added to that. This is done because each component can have different groups belonging to the Common group notion; the Common group for a component is just shorthand for all the groups in that component.

The Aggregate's specification of the default group and search strategy override any specifications contained in the components.

The Parameter Settings page is rather straightforward; it is where the user defines parameter settings for their engines. An example of such a page is given below:

For single valued attributes, the user simply types the default value into the Value box on the right hand side. For multi-valued parameters the user should use the Add, Edit and Remove buttons to manage the list of multiple parameter values.

Values within groups are shown with each group separately displayed, to allow configuring different values for each group.

Values are checked for validity. For Boolean values in a list, use the words true or false.

This page declares the type system used by the annotator. For aggregates it is derived by merging the type systems of all constituent AEs. The types used by the AE constitute the language in which the inputs and outputs are described in the Capabilities page and also affect the choice of indexes on the Indexes page. The Type System page looks like the following:

Before discussing this page in detail, it is important to note that there are two settings that affect the operation of this page. These are accessed by selecting the UIMA → Settings (or by going to the Eclipse Window → Preferences → UIMA Preferences) and checking or unchecking one of the following: “Auto generate .java files when defining types” and “Display fully qualified type names.”

When the Auto generate option is checked and the development language for the AE is Java, any time a change is made to a type and the change is saved, the corresponding .java files are generated using the JCasGen tool. The results are stored in the primary source directory defined for the project. The primary source directory is that listed first when you right click on your project and select Properties → Java Build Path, click on the Source tab and look in the list box under the text that reads: “Source folder on build path.” If no source folders are defined, you will get a warning that you have no source folders defined and JCasGen will not be run. (For information on JCasGen see Chapter 6, JCasGen User's Guide). When JCasGen is run, you can monitor the progress of the generation by observing the status on the Eclipse status line (normally at the bottom of the Eclipse window). JCasGen runs on the fully-merged type system, consisting of the type specification plus any imported type system, plus (for aggregates) the merged type systems of all the components in an aggregate.

When “Display fully qualified type names” is left unchecked, the namespace of types is not displayed, i.e. if a fully qualified type name is my.namespace.person, only the abbreviated type name person will be displayed. In the Type page diagram shown above, “Display fully qualified type names” is in fact unchecked.

To add, edit, or remove types the buttons on the top left section are used. When adding or editing types, fully qualified type names should of course be used, regardless of whether the “Display fully qualified type names” is unchecked. Removing or editing a type will have a cascading effect in that the type removal/edit will effect inputs, outputs, indexes and type priorities in the natural way.

When a type is added, this dialog is shown:

Type names should be specified using a namespace. The namespace is like a Java package name, and serves to insure type names are unique. It also serves as the package name for the generated JCas classes. The namespace name is the set of names up to the last period in the string.

The supertype must be picked from an existing type. The entry field for the supertype supports Eclipse-style content assist. To use it, put the cursor in the supertype field, and type a letter or two of the supertype name (lower case is fine), either starting with the name space, or just with the type name (without the name space), and hold down the Control key and then press the spacebar. When you do this, you can see a list of suitable matching types. You can then type more letters to narrow down your choices, or pick the right entry with the mouse.

To see the available types and pick one, press the Browse button. This will show the available types, and as you type letters for the type name (in lower case – capitalization is ignored), the available types that match are narrowed. When you've typed enough to specify the type you want, press Enter. Or you can use the list of matching type names and pick the one you want with the mouse.

Once you've added the type, you can add features to it by highlighting the type, and pressing the Add button.

If the type being defined is a subtype of uima.cas.String, the Add button allows you to add allowed values for the string, instead of adding features.

To edit a type or feature, you can double click the entry, or highlight the entry and press the Edit button. To delete a type or feature, you highlight the entry to be deleted, and click the delete button or push the delete key.

If the range of a feature is an array or one of the built-in list types, an additional specification allows you to specify if multiple references to the object referenced by this feature are allowed. If they are not allowed then the XMI serialization of instances of this type use a more efficient format.

If the range of a feature is an array of Feature Structures, then it is possible to specify an element type for the array. This information is used in the XMI serialization and also by the JCas generation routines to generate more efficient code.

It is also possible to import type systems for inclusion in your descriptor. To do this, use the Type Import panel's Add... button. This allows you to import a type system descriptor.

When importing by name, the name is resolved using the class path for the Eclipse project containing the descriptor file being edited, or by looking up this name in the UIMA DataPath. The DataPath can be set by pushing the Set DataPath button. It will be remembered for this Eclipse project, as a project Property, so you only have to set it once (per project). The value of the DataPath setting is written just like a class path, and can include directories or JAR files, just as is true for class paths.

The following dialog allows you to pick one or more files from the Eclipse workspace, or one file (at a time) from the file system:

This is essentially the same dialog as was used to add component engines to an aggregate. To import from a type system descriptor that is not part of your Eclipse workspace, click the Browse the file system.... button.

Imported types are validated, and if OK, they are added to the list in the Imported Type Systems section of the Type System page. Any types they define are merged with the existing type system.

Imported types and features which are only defined in imports are shown in the Type System section, but in a grayed-out font; these type cannot be edited here. To change them, open up the imported type system descriptor, and change them there.

If you hover the mouse over an import specification, it will show more information about the import. If you right-click, it will bring up a context menu that allows opening the imported file in the Editor, if the imported file is part of the Eclipse workspace. Changes you make, however, won't be seen until you close and reopen the editor on the importing file.

It is not possible to define types for an aggregate analysis engine. In this case the type system is computed from the component AEs. The Type System information is shown in a grayed-out font.

1.8.1. Exporting

In addition to importing type specifications, you can export as well. When you push the Export... button, the editor will create a new importable XML descriptor for the types in this type system, and change the existing descriptor to import that newly created one.

The base file name you type is inserted into the path in the line below automatically. You can change the path where the generated part descriptor is stored by overtyping the lower text box. When you click OK, the new part descriptor will be generated, and the current descriptor will be changed to import that part.

Capabilities come in “sets”. You can have multiple sets of capabilities; each one specifies languages supported, plus inputs and outputs of the Analysis Engine. The idea behind having multiple sets is the concept that different inputs can result in different outputs. Many Analysis Engines, though, will probably define just one set of capabilities. A sample Capabilities page is given below:

When defining the capabilities of a primitive analysis engine, input and output types can be any type defined in the type system. When defining the capabilities of an aggregate the inputs must be a subset of the union of the inputs in the constituent analysis engines and the outputs must be a subset of the union of the outputs of the constituent analysis engines.

To add a type, first select something in the set you wish to add the type to, and press Add Type. The following dialog appears presenting the user with a list of types which are candidates for additional inputs:

Follow the instructions to mark the types as input and / or output (a type can be both). By default, the <all features> flag is set to true. If you want to specify a subset of features of a type, read on.

When types have features, you can specify what features are input and / or output. A type doesn't have to be an output to have an output feature. For example, an Analysis Engine might be passed as input a type Token, and it adds (outputs) a feature to the existing Token types. If no new Token instances were created, it would not be an output Type, but it would have features which are output.

To specify features as input and / or output (they can be both), select a type, and press Add. The following dialog box appears:

To mark a feature as being input and / or output, click the mouse in the input and / or output column for the feature. If you select <all features>, it unmarks any individual feature you selected, since <all features> subsumes all the features.

The Languages part of the capability is where you specify what languages are supported by the Analysis Engine. Supported languages should be listed using either a two letter ISO-639 language code, or an ISO-639 language code followed by a two-letter ISO-3166 country code. Add a language by selecting Languages and pressing the Add button. The dialog for adding languages is given below.

The Sofa part of the capability is optional; it allows defining Sofa names that this component uses, and whether they are input (meaning they are created outside of this component, and passed into it), or output (meaning that they are created by this component). Note that a Sofa can be either input or output, but can't be both.

To add a Sofa name (which is synonymous with the view name), press the Add Sofa button, and this dialog appears:

1.9.1. Sofa (and view) name mappings

Sofa names, once created, are used in Sofa Mappings. These are optional mappings, done in an aggregate, that specify which Sofas are the same ones but with different names. The Sofa Mappings section is minimized unless you are editing an Aggregate descriptor, and have one or more Sofa names defined for the aggregate. In that case, the Sofa Mappings section will look like this:

Here the aggregate has defined two input Sofas, named “MyInputSofa”, and “AnotherSofa”. Any named sofas in the aggregate's capabilities will appear in the Sofa Mapping section, listed either under Inputs or Outputs. Each name in the Mappings has 0 or more delegate (component) sofa names mapped to it. A delegate may have multiple Sofas, as in this example, where the GovernmentOfficialRecognizer delegate has Sofas named “so1” and “so2”.

Delegate components may be written as Single-View components. In this case, they have one implicit, default Sofa (“_InitialView”), and to map to it you use the form shown for the “NameRecognizer” – you map to the delegate's key name in the aggregate, without specifying a Sofa name. You can also specify the sofa name explicitly, e.g., NameRecognizer/_InitialView.

To add a new mapping, select the Aggregate Sofa name you wish to add the mapping for, and press the Add button. This brings up a window like this, showing all available delegates and their Sofas; select one or more (use the normal multi-select methods) of these and press OK to add them.

To edit an existing mapping, select the mapping and press Edit. This will show the existing mapping with all mapped items “selected”, and other available items unselected. Change the items selected to match what you want, deselecting some, and perhaps selecting others, and press OK.

The Indexes page is where the user declares what indexes and type priority lists are used by the analysis engine. Indexes are used to determine which Feature Structures of a particular type are fetched, using an iterator in the UIMA API. An unpopulated Indexes page is displayed below:

Both indexes and type priority lists can have imports. These imports work just like the type system imports, described above. Both indexes and type priority lists can be exported to new component descriptors, using the Export... button, just like the type system export operation described above.

The built-in Annotation Index is always present. It is based on the built-in type uima.tcas.Annotation and has keys begin (Ascending), end (Descending) and TYPE_PRIORITY. There are no built-in type priorities, so this last sort item does not play a role in the index unless type priorities are specified.

Type priority may be combined with other keys. Type priorities are defined in the Priority Lists section, using one or more priority list. A given priority list gives an ordering among a group of types. Types that appear higher in the priority list are given higher priority, in other words, they sort first when TYPE_PRIORITY is specified as the index key. Subtypes of these types are also ordered in a consistent manner, unless overridden by another specific type priority specification. To get the ordering used among all the types, all of the type priority lists are merged. This gives a partial ordering among the types. Ties are resolved in an unspecified fashion. The Component Descriptor Editor checks for incompatible orderings, and informs the user if they exist, so they can be corrected.

To create a new index, use the Add Index button in the top left section. This brings up this dialog:

Each index needs a globally unique index name. Every index indexes one CAS type (including its subtypes). If you're using Eclipse 3.2 or later, the entry field for this has content assist (start typing the type name and press Control – Spacebar to get help, or press the Browse button to pick a type).

Indexes can be sorted, in which case you need to specify one or more keys to sort on. Sort keys are selected from features whose range type is Integer, Float, or String. Some elements will be disabled if they are not relevant. For instance, if the index kind is “bag”, you cannot provide sort keys. The order of sort keys can be adjusted using the up and down buttons, if necessary.

A set index will contain no duplicates of the same type, where a duplicate is defined by the indexing comparator. That is, if you commit two feature structures of the same type that are equal with respect to the indexing comparator, only the first one will be entered into the index. Note that you can still have duplicates with respect to the indexing order, if they are of a different type. A set index is not guaranteed to be sorted. If no keys are specified for a set index, then all instances are considered by default to be equal, so only the first instance (for a particular type or subtype of the type being indexed) is indexed. On the other hand, “bag” indicates that all annotation instances are indexed, including duplicates.

The Priority Lists section of the Indexes page is used to specify Priority Lists of types. Priority Lists are unnamed ordered sets of type names. Add a new priority list by clicking the Add Set button. Add a type to an existing priority list by first selecting the set, and then clicking Add. You can use the up and down buttons to adjust the order as necessary; these buttons move the selected item up or down.

Although it is possible to import self-contained index and type priority files, the creation of such files is not yet supported by the Component Descriptor Editor. If you create these files using another editor, they can be imported using the corresponding Import panels, shown on the right. Imports are specified in the same manner as they are for Type System imports.

The resources page describes resource dependencies (for primitive Analysis Engines) and external Resource specification and their bindings to the resource dependencies.

Only primitive Analysis Engines define resource dependencies. Primitive and Aggregate Analysis Engines can define external resources and connect them (bind them) to resource dependencies.

When an Aggregate is providing an external resource to be bound to a dependency, the binding is specified using a possibly multi-level path, starting at the Aggregate, and specify which component (by its key name), and then if that component is, in turn, an Aggregate, which component (again by its key name), and so on until you reach a primitive. The sequence of key names is made into the binding specification by joining the parts with a “/” character. All of this is done for you by the Component Descriptor Editor.

Any external resource provided by an Aggregate will override any binding provided by any lower level component for the same resource dependency.

There are two views of the Resources page, depending on whether the Analysis Engine is an Aggregate or Primitive. Here's the view for a Primitive:

To declare a resource dependency, click the Add button in the right hand panel. This puts up the dialog:

The Key must be unique within the descriptor declaring it. The Interface, if present, is the name of a Java interface the Analysis Engine uses to access the resource.

Declare actual External resource on the left side of the page. Clicking “Add” brings up this dialog:

The Name must be unique within this Analysis Engine. The URL identifies a file resource. If both the URL and URL suffix are used, the file resource is formed by combining the first URL part with the language-identifier, followed by the URL suffix; see Section 2.4.1.11, “Resource Manager Configuration” in UIMA References . URLs may be written as “relative” URLs; in this case they are resolved by looking them up relative to the classpath and/or datapath. A relative URL has the path part starting without an intial “/”; for example: file:my/directory/file. An absolute URL starts with file:/ or file:/// or file://some.network.address/. For more information about URLs, please read the javaDoc information for the Java class “URL”.

The Implementation is optional, and if given, must be a Java class that implements the interface specified in any Resource Dependencies this resource is bound to.

The Source page is a text view of the xml content of the Analysis Engine or Type System being configured. An example of this page is displayed below:

Changes made in the GUI are immediately reflected in the xml source, and changes made in the xml source are immediately reflected back in the GUI. The thought here is that the GUI view and the Source view are just two ways of looking at the same data. When the data is in an unsaved state the file name is prefaced with an asterisk in the currently selected file tab in the editor pane inside Eclipse (as in the example above).

You may accidentally create invalid descriptors or XML by editing directly in the Source view. If you do this, when you try and save or when you switch to a different view, the error will be detected and reported. In the case of saving, the file will be saved, even if it is in an error state.

It is also possible to use the Component Descriptor Editor to create or edit self-contained type systems. To create a self-contained type system, select the menu item File → New → Other and then select Type System Descriptor File. From the next page of the selection wizard specify a Parent Folder and File name and click Finish.

This will take you to a version of the Component Descriptor Editor for editing a type system file which contains just three pages: an overview page, a type system page, and a source page. The overview page is a bit more spartan than in the case of an AE. It looks like the following:

Just like an AE has an associated name, version, vendor and description, the same is true of a self-contained type system. The Type System page is identical to that in an AE descriptor file, as is the Source page. Note that a self-contained type system can import type systems just like the type system associated with an AE.

A type system component can also be created from an existing descriptor which contains a type system definition section, by clicking on the Export... button on the Type System page.

The new wizard can create several other kinds of components: Collection Processing Management (CPM) components, flow controllers, and importable parts (besides Type Systems, described above, Indexes, Type Priorities, and Resource Manager Configuration imports).

The CPM components supported by this editor include the Collection Reader, CAS Initializer, and CAS Consumer descriptors. Each of these is basically treated just like a primitive AE descriptor, with small changes to accommodate the different semantics. For instance, a CAS Consumer can't declare in its capabilities section that it outputs types or features.

Flow controllers are components that control the flow of CASes within an aggregate, an are edited in a similar fashion as a primitive Analysis Engine.

The importable part support requires context information to enable the editor to work, because much of the power of this editor comes from extensive checking that requires additional information, other than what is available in just the importable part. For instance, when you create or edit an Indexes import, the facility for adding new indexes needs the type information, which is not present in this part when it is edited alone.

To overcome this, when you edit these descriptors, you will be asked to specify a context descriptor, usually a descriptor which would import the part being edited, which would have the additional information needed.

Various methods are used to guess what the context descriptor should be - and if the guess is correct, you can just press the Enter key to confirm. The last successful context file is remembered and will be suggested as the context file to use at the next edit session

The CPE Configurator only supports basic CPE configurations.

It only supports “Integrated” deployments (although it will connect to remotes if particular CAS Processors are specified with remote service descriptors). It doesn't support configuration of the error handling. It doesn't support Sofa Mappings; it assumes all Single-View components are operating with the _InitialView Sofa. Multi-View components will not have their names mapped. It sets up a fixed-sized CAS Pool.

To set these additional options, you must edit the CPE Descriptor XML file directly. See Chapter 3, Collection Processing Engine Descriptor Reference in UIMA References for the syntax. You may then open the CPE Descriptor in the CPE Configurator and run it. The changes you applied to the CPE Descriptor will be respected, although you will not be able to see them or edit them from the GUI.

The CPE Configurator tool can be run using the cpeGui shell script, which is located in the bin directory of the UIMA SDK. If you've installed the example Eclipse project (see Section 3.2, “Setting up Eclipse to view Example Code” in UIMA Overview & SDK Setup, you can also run it using the “UIMA CPE GUI” run configuration provided in that project.

When you first start the CPE Configurator, you will see the main window shown here:

The CPE Configurator's main window is divided into three sections, one each for the Collection Reader, Analysis Engines, and CAS Consumers.^[2]

In each section of the CPE Configurator, you can select the component(s) you want to use by browsing to (or typing the location of) their XML descriptors. You must select a Collection Reader, and at least one Analysis Engine or CAS Consumer.

When you select a descriptor, the configuration parameters that are defined in that descriptor will then be displayed in the GUI; these can be modified to override the values present in the descriptor.

For example, the screen shot below shows the CPE Configurator after the following components have been chosen:

examples/descriptors/collectionReader/FileSystemCollectionReader.xml
examples/descriptors/analysis_engine/NamesAndPersonTitles_TAE.xml
examples/descriptors/cas_consumer/XmiWriterCasConsumer.xml

After selecting each of the components and providing configuration settings, click the play (forward arrow) button at the bottom of the screen to begin processing. A progress bar should be displayed in the lower left corner. (Note that the progress bar will not begin to move until all components have completed their initialization, which may take several seconds.) Once processing has begun, the pause and stop buttons become enabled.

If an error occurs, you will be informed by an error dialog. If processing completes successfully, you will be presented with a performance report.

The CPE Configurator's File Menu has the following options:

Open CPE Descriptor will allow you to select a CPE Descriptor file from disk, and will read in that CPE Descriptor and configure the GUI appropriately.

Save CPE Descriptor will create a CPE Descriptor file that defines the CPE you have constructed. This CPE Descriptor will identify the components that constitute the CPE, as well as the configuration settings you have specified for each of these components. Later, you can use “Open CPE Descriptor” to restore the CPE Configurator to the state. Also, CPE Descriptors can be used to easily run a CPE from a Java program – see Section 3.3.1, “Running a CPE from a Descriptor” in UIMA Tutorial and Developers' Guides .

CPE Descriptors also allow specifying operational parameters, such as error handling options that are not currently available for configuration through the CPE Configurator. For more information on manually creating a CPE Descriptor, see Chapter 3, Collection Processing Engine Descriptor Reference in UIMA References .

The Save Options submenu has one item, "Use <import>". If this item is checked (the default), saved CPE descriptors will use the <import> syntax to refer to their component descriptors. If unchecked, the older <include> syntax will be used for new components that you add to your CPE using the GUI. (However, if you open a CPE descriptor that used <import>, these imports will not be replaced.)

Refresh Descriptors from File System will reload all descriptors from disk. This is useful if you have made a change to the descriptor outside of the CPE Configurator, and want to refresh the display.

Clear All will reset the CPE Configurator to its initial state, with no components selected.

Exit will close the CPE Configurator. If you have unsaved changes, you will be prompted as to whether you would like to save them to a CPE Descriptor file. If you do not save them, they will be lost.

When you restart the CPE Configurator, it will automatically reload the last CPE descriptor file that you were working with.

The CPE Configurator's Help menu provides “About” information and some very simple instructions on how to use the tool.

To run the Document Analyzer, execute the documentAnalyzer script that is in the bin directory of your UIMA SDK installation, or, if you are using the example Eclipse project, execute the “UIMA Document Analyzer” run configuration supplied with that project.

Note that if you're planning to run an Analysis Engine other than one of the examples included in the UIMA SDK, you'll first need to update your CLASSPATH environment variable to include the classes needed by that Analysis Engine.

When you first run the Document Analyzer, you should see a screen that looks like this:

To run a AE, you must first configure the six fields on the main screen of the Document Analyzer.

Input Directory: Browse to or type the path of a directory containing text files that you want to analyze. Some sample documents are provided in the UIMA SDK under the examples/data directory.

Output Directory: Browse to or type the path of a directory where you want output to be written. (As we'll see later, you won't normally need to look directly at these files, but the Document Analyzer needs to know where to write them.) The files written to this directory will be an XML representation of the analyzed documents. If this directory doesn't exist, it will be created. If the directory exists, any files in it will be deleted (but the tool will ask you to confirm this before doing so). If you leave this field blank, your AE will be run but no output will be generated.

Location of AE XML Descriptor: Browse to or type the path of the descriptor for the AE that you want to run. There are some example descriptors provided in the UIMA SDK under the examples/descriptors/analysis_engine and examples/descriptors/tutorial directories.

XML Tag containing Text: This is an optional feature. If you enter a value here, it specifies the name of an XML tag, expected to be found within the input documents, that contains the text to be analyzed. For example, the value TEXT would cause the AE to only analyze the portion of the document enclosed within <TEXT>...</TEXT> tags. Also, any XML tags occuring within that text will be removed prior to analysis.

Language: Specify the language in which the documents are written. Some Analysis Engines, but not all, require that this be set correctly in order to do their analysis. You can select a value from the drop-down list or type your own. The value entered here must be an ISO language identifier, the list of which can be found here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt.

Character Encoding: The character encoding of the input files. The default, UTF-8, also works fine for ASCII text files. If you have a different encoding, enter it here. For more information on character sets and their names, see the Javadocs for java.nio.charset.Charset.

Once you've filled in the appropriate values, press the “Run” button.

If an error occurs, a dialog will appear with the error message. (A stack trace will also be printed to the console, which may help you if the error was generated by your own annotator code.) Otherwise, an “Analysis Results” window will appear.

After a successful analysis, the “Analysis Results” window will appear.

The “Results Display Format” options at the bottom of this window show the different ways you can view your analysis – the Java Viewer, Java Viewer (JV) with User Colors, HTML, and XML. The default, Java Viewer, is recommended.

Once you have selected your desired Results Display Format, you can double-click on one of the files in the list to view the analysis done on that file.

For the Java viewer, the results display looks like this (for the AE descriptor examples/descriptors/tutorial/ex4/MeetingDetectorAE.xml):

You can click the mouse on one of the highlighted annotations to see a list of all its features in the frame on the right.

If there are multiple annotation types in the view, you can control which ones are selected by using the checkboxes in the legend, the Select All button, or the Deselect All button.

If you are viewing a CAS that contains multiple subjects of analysis, then a selector will appear at the bottom right of the Annotation Viewer window. This will allow you to choose the Sofa that you wish to view. Note that only text Sofas containing a non-null document are available for viewing.

The “JV User Colors” and the HTML viewer allow you to specify exactly which colors are used to display each of your annotation types. For the Java Viewer, you can also specify which types should be initially selected, and you can hide types entirely.

To configure the viewer, click the “Edit Style Map” button on the “Analysis Results” dialog. You should see a dialog that looks like this:

To change the color assigned to a type, simply click on the colored cell in the “Background” column for the type you wish to edit. This will display a dialog that allows you to choose the color. For the HTML viewer only, you can also change the foreground color.

If you would like the type to be initially checked (selected) in the legend when the viewer is first launched, check the box in the “Checked” column. If you would like the type to never be shown in the viewer, click the box in the “Hidden” column. These settings only affect the Java Viewer, not the HTML view.

When you are done editing, click the “Save” button. This will save your choices to a file in the same directory as your AE descriptor. From now on, when you view analysis results produced by this AE using the “JV User Colors” or “HTML” options, the viewer will be configured as you have specified.

Interactive Mode allows you to analyze text that you type or cut-and-paste into the tool, rather than requiring that the documents be stored as files.

In the main Document Analyzer window, you can invoke Interactive Mode by clicking the “Interactive” button instead of the “Run” button. This will display a dialog that looks like this:

You can type or cut-and-paste your text into this window, then choose your Results Display Format and click the “Analyze” button. Your AE will be run on the text that you supplied and the results will be displayed as usual.

If you have previously run a AE and saved its analysis results, you can use the Document Analyzer's View mode to view those results, without re-running your analysis. To do this, on the main Document Analyzer window simply select the location of your analyzed documents in the “Output Directory” dialog and click the “View” button. You can then view your analysis results as described in Section Section 3.3, “Viewing the Analysis Results”.

The CAS Visual Debugger is a tool to run text analysis engines in UIMA and view the results. The tool is implemented as a stand-alone GUI tool using Java's Swing library.

This is a developer's tool.  It is intended to support you in writing text analysis annotators for UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture).  As a development tool, the emphasis is not so much on pretty pictures, but rather on navigability.  It is intended to show you all the information you need, and show it to you quickly (at least on a fast machine ;-).

The main purpose of this application is to let you browse all the data that was created when you ran an analysis engine over some text.  The display mimics the access methods you have in the CAS API in terms of indexes, types, feature structures and feature values.

As in the CAS, there is special support for annotations.  Clicking on an annotation will select the corresponding text, and conversely, you can display all annotations that cover a given position in the text. This will be explained in more detail in the section on the main display area.

As usual, the graphics in this manual are for illustrative purposes and may not look 100% like the actual version of CVD you are running. This depends on your operating system, your version of Java, and a variety of other factors.

5.1.1. Running CVD

You will usually want to start CVD from the command line, or from Eclipse. To start CVD from the command line, you minimally need the uima-core and uima-tools jars. Below is a sample command line for sh and its offspring.

java -cp ${UIMA_HOME}/lib/uima-core.jar:${UIMA_HOME}/lib/uima-tools.jar 
    org.apache.uima.tools.cvd.CVD

However, there is no need to type this. The ${UIMA_HOME}/bin directory contains a cvd.sh and cvd.bat file for Windows and *nix operating systems.

In Eclipse, you have a ready to use launch configuration available when you have installed the UIMA sample project (see Section 3.2, “Setting up Eclipse to view Example Code” in UIMA Overview & SDK Setup). Below is a screenshot of the the Eclipse Run dialog with the CVD run configuration selected.

On encountering an error, CVD will pop up an error dialog with a short, usually incomprehensible message.  Often, the error message will claim that there is more information available in the log file, and sometimes, this is actually true; so do go and check the log.  You can view the log file by selecting the appropriate item in the "Tools" menu.

The program will attempt to read on startup and save on exit a file called annotViewer.pref in your home directory.  This file contains information about choices you made while running the program: directories (such as where your data files are) and window sizes.  These settings will be used the next time you use the program. There is no user control over this process, but the file format is reasonably transparent, in case you feel like changing it.  Note, however, that the file will be overwritten every time you exit the program.

We give a brief description of the various menus. All menu items come with mnemonics (e.g., Alt-F X will exit the program). In addition, some menu items have their own keyboard accelerators that you can use anywhere in the program. For example, Ctrl-S will save the text you've been editing.

5.4.1. The File Menu

The File menu lets you load, create and save text, load and save color settings, and import and export the XCAS format. Here's a screenshot.

Below is a list of the menu items, together with an explanation.

• New Text...  Clears the text area. Text you type is written to an anonymous buffer. You can use "Save Text As..." to save the text you typed to a file. Note: whenever you modify the text, be it through typing, loading a file or using the "New Text..." menu item, previous analysis results will be lost. Since the previous analysis is specific to the text, modifying the text invalidates the analysis.

• Open Text File.  Loads a new text file into the viewer.  The next time you run an analysis engine, it will run the text you loaded last.  Depending on the annotator you're using, the program may run slow with very large text files, so you may want to experiment.

• Save Text File.  Saves the currently open text file. If no file is currently loaded (either because you haven't loaded a file, or you've used the "New Text..." menu item), this menu item is disabled (and Ctrl-S will do nothing).

• Save Text As...  Save the text to a file of your choosing. This can be an existing file, which is then overwritten, or it can be a new file that you're creating.

• Change Code Page.  Allows you to change the code page that is used to load and save text files. If you're sure the text you're loading is in ASCII or one of the 8-bit extensions such as ISO-8859-1 (ISO Latin1), there is probably nothing you need to do. Just load the text and look at the display. If you see no funny characters or square boxes, chances are your selected code page is compatible with your text file. Note that the code page setting is also in effect when you save files. You can observe the effects with a hex editor or by just looking at the file size. For example, if you save the default text This is where the text goes. to a file on Windows using the default code page, the size of the file will be 28 bytes. If you now change the code page to UTF-16 and save the file again, the file size will be 58 bytes: two bytes for each character, plus two bytes for the byte-order mark. Now switch the code page back to the default Windows code page and reload the UTF-16 file to see the difference in the editor. By default, the code page options include all code pages that any Java implementation must support: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, UTF-16BE (big-endian), UTF-16LE (little endian) and UTF-16 (with magic marker). Also included is the system code page, if it is not among the built-in ones. Prior to Java 1.4, there is no programmatic way to determine what the complete list of supported code pages is. Therefore, you can add your own code page in the corresponding submenu. All this amounts to is adding a string. The new code page is automatically selected as the current code page. The way to find out if the code page you entered is supported in your Java implementation is to try and load a text file. If you see an error ``Unsupported text encoding'', the code page is not supported.

• Load Color Settings.  Load previously saved color settings from a file (see Tools/Customize Annotation Display).  It is highly recommended that you only load automatically generated files.  Strange things may happen if you try to load the wrong file format. On startup, the program attempts to load the last color settings file that you loaded or saved during a previous session. If you intend to use the same color settings as the last time you ran the program, there is therefore no need to manually load a color settings file.

• Save Color Settings.  Save your customized color settings (see Tools/Customize Annotation Display).  The file is a Java properties file, and as such, reasonably transparent.  What is not transparent is the encoding of the colors (integer encoding of 24-bit RGB values), so changing the file by hand is not really recommended.

• Read Type System File.  Load a type system file. This allows you to load an XCAS file without having to have access to the corresponding annotator.

• Write Type System File.  Create a type system file from the currently loaded type definitions. In addition, you can save the current CAS as a XCAS file (see below). This allows you to later load the type system and XCAS to view the CAS without having to rerun the annotator.

• Read XMI CAS File.  Read an XMI CAS file. Important: XMI CAS is a serialization format that serializes a CAS without type system and index information. It is therefore impossible to read in a stand-alone XMI CAS file. XMI CAS files can only be interpreted in the context of an existing type system. Consequently, you need to load the TAE that was used to create the XCAS file to be able to load it.

• Write XMI CAS File.  Writes the current analysis out as an XMI CAS file.

• Read XCAS File.  Read an XCAS file. Important: XCAS is a serialization format that serializes a CAS without type system and index information. It is therefore impossible to read in a stand-alone XCAS file. XCAS files can only be interpreted in the context of an existing type system. Consequently, you need to load the TAE that was used to create the XCAS file to be able to load it. Loading a XCAS file without loading the TAE may produce strange errors. You may get syntax errors on loading the XCAS file, or worse, everything may appear to go smoothly but in reality your CAS may be corrupted.

• Write XCAS File.  Writes the current analysis out as an XCAS file.

• Exit. Exits the program. Your preferences will be saved.

5.4.2. The Edit Menu

The "Edit" menu provides a standard text editing menu with Cut, Copy and Paste, as well as unlimited Undo.

Note that standard keyboard accelerators Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Ctrl-Z can be used for Cut, Copy, Paste and Undo, respectively. The text area supports other standard keyboard operations such as navigation HOME, Ctrl-HOME etc., as well as marking text with Shift- <ArrowKey>.

5.4.3. The Run Menu

In the Run menu, you can load and run text analysis engines.

• Load AE.  Loads and initializes a text analysis engine. Choosing this menu item will display a file open dialog where you should choose an XML descriptor of a Text Analysis Engine to process the current text.  Even if the analysis engine runs fast, this will take a while, since there is a lot of setup work to do when a new TAE is created.  So be patient. When you develop a new annotator, you will often need to recompile your code. Gladis will not reload your annotator code. When you recompile your code, you need to terminate the GUI and restart it. If you only make changes to the XML descriptor, you don't need to restart the GUI. Simply reload the XML file.

• Run AE.  Before you have (successfully) loaded a TAE, this menu item will be disabled. After you have loaded a TAE, it will be enabled, and the name changes according to the name of the TAE you have loaded. For example, if you've loaded "The World's Fastest Parser", you will have a menu item called "Run The World's Fastest Parser". When you choose the item, the TAE is run on whatever text you have currently loaded. After a TAE has run successfully, the index window in the upper left-hand corner of the screen should be updated and show the indexes that were created by this run.  We will have more to say about indexes and what to do with them later.

• Run AE on CAS.  This allows you to run an analysis engine on the current CAS. This is useful if you have loaded a CAS from an XCAS file, and would like to run further analysis on it.

• Recently used.  Collects a list of recently used analysis engines as a short-cut for loading.

• Language.  Some annotators do language specific processing. For example, if you run lexical analysis, the results may be quite different depending on what the analysis engine thinks the language of the document is. With this menu item, you can manually set the document language. Alternatively, you can use an automatic language identification annotator. If the analysis engines you're working with are language agnostic, there is no need to set the language.

5.4.4. The tools menu

The tools menu contains some assorted utilities, such as the log file viewer. Here you can also set the log level for UIMA. A more detailed description of some of the menu items follows below.

5.4.4.1. View Type System

Brings up a new window that displays the type system. This menu item is disabled until the first time you have run an analysis engine, since there is no type system to display until then. An example is shown above.

You can view the inheritance tree on the left by expanding and collapsing nodes.  When you select a type, the features defined on that type are displayed in the table on the right.  The feature table has three columns.  The first gives the name of the feature, the second one the type of the feature (i.e., what values it takes), and the third column displays the highest type this feature is defined on.  In this example, the features "begin" and "end" are inherited from the built-in annotation type.

In the options menu, you can configure if you want to see inherited features or not (not yet implemented).

5.4.4.2. Show Selected Annotations

Figure 5.1.  Annotations produced by a statistical named entity tagger

To enable this menu, you must have run an analysis engine and selected the ``AnnotationIndex'' or one of its subnodes in the upper left hand corncer of the screen.  It will bring up a new text window with all selected annotations marked up in the text. 

Figure 5.1, “ Annotations produced by a statistical named entity tagger ” shows the results of applying a statistical named entity tagger to a newspaper article.  Some annotation colors have been customized: countries are in reverse video, organizations have a turquois background, person names are green, and occupations have a maroon background.  The default background color is yellow.  This color is also used if there is more than one annotation spanning a certain text.  Clearly, this display is only useful if you don't have any overlapping annotations, or at least not too many.

This menu item is also available as a context menu in the Index Tree area of the main window. To use it, select the annotation index or one of its subnodes, right-click to bring up a popup menu, and select the only item in the popup menu. The popup menu is actually a better way to invoke the annotation display, since it changes according to the selection in the Index Tree area, and will tell you if what you've selected can be displayed or not.

The main display area has three sub-areas.  In the upper left-hand corner is the index display, which shows the indexes that were defined in the AE, as well as the types of the indexes and their subtypes.  In the lower left-hand corner, the content of indexes and sub-indexes is displayed (FS display).  Clicking on any node in the index display will show the corresponding feature structures in the FS display.  You can explore those structures by expanding the tree nodes.  When you click on a node that represents an annotation, clicking on it will cause the corresponding text span to marked in the text display.

Figure 5.2. State of GUI after running an analysis engine

Figure 5.2, “State of GUI after running an analysis engine” shows the state after running the UIMA_Analysis_Example.xml aggregate from the uimaj-examples project.  There are two indexes in the index display, and the annotation index has been selected.  Note that the number of structures in an index is displayed in square brackets after the index name.

Since displaying thousands of sister nodes is both confusing and slow, nodes are grouped in powers of 10.  As soon as there are no more than 100 sister nodes, they are displayed next to each other.

In our example, a name annotation has been selected, and the corresponding token text is highlighted in the text area.  We have also expanded the token node to display its structure (not much to see in this simple example).

In Figure 5.2, “State of GUI after running an analysis engine”, we selected an annotation in the FS display to find the corresponding text.  We can also do the reverse and find out what annotations cover a certain point in the text.  Let's go back to the name recognizer for an example.

Figure 5.3.  Finding annotations for a specific location in the text

We would like to know if the Michael Baessler has been recognized as a name.  So we position the cursor in the corresponding text span somewhere, then right-click to bring up the context menu telling us which annotations exist at this point. An example is shown in Figure 5.3, “ Finding annotations for a specific location in the text ”.

Figure 5.4.  Selecting an annotation from the context menu will highlight that annotation in the FS display

At this point (Figure 5.3, “ Finding annotations for a specific location in the text ”), we only know that somewhere around the text cursor position (not visible in the picture), we discovered a name. When we select the corresponding entry in the context menu, the name annotation is selected in the FS display, and its covered text is highlighted. Figure 5.4, “ Selecting an annotation from the context menu will highlight that annotation in the FS display ” shows the display after the name node has been selected in the popup menu.

We're glad to see that, indeed, Michael Baessler is considered to be a name.  Note that in the FS display, the corresponding annotation node has been selected, and the tree has been expanded to make the node visible.

NB that the annotations displayed in the popup menu come from the annotations currently displayed in the FS display.  If you didn't select the annotation index or one of its sub-nodes, no annotations can be displayed and the popup menu will be empty.

There is no capability to automatically merge the generated Java source with previous versions, unless running with Eclipse. If run without Eclipse, no automatic merging of the generated Java source is done with any previous versions. In this case, the output is put in a folder called “JCasNew” unless overridden by specifying a second argument.

The distribution includes a shell script/bat file to run the stand-alone version, called jcasgen.

If you have Eclipse and EMF (EMF = Eclipse Modeling Framework; both of these are available from http://www.eclipse.org) installed (version 3 or later) JCasGen can merge the Java code it generates with previous versions, picking up changes you might have inserted by hand. The output (and source of the merge input) is in a folder “JCas” under the same path as the input XML file, unless overridden by specifying a second argument.

You must install the UIMA plug-ins into Eclipse to enable this function.

The distribution includes a shell script/bat file to run the stand-alone with Eclipse version, called jcasgen_merge. This works by starting Eclipse in “headless” mode (no GUI) and invoking JCasGen within Eclipse. You will need to set the ECLIPSE_HOME environment variable or modify the jcasgen_merge shell script to specify where to find Eclipse. The version of Eclipse needed is 3 or higher, with the EMF plug-in and the UIMA runtime plug-in installed. A temporary workspace is used; the name/location of this is customizable in the shell script.

Log and error messages are written to the UIMA log. This file is called uima.log, and is located in the default working directory, which if not overridden, is the startup directory of Eclipse.

There are two ways to run JCasGen within Eclipse. The first way is to configure an Eclipse external tools launcher, and use it to run the stand-alone shell scripts, with the arguments filled in. Here's a picture of a typical launcher configuration screen (you get here by navigating from the top menu: Run –> External Tools –> External tools...).

The second way (which is the normal way it's done) to run within Eclipse is to use the Component Descriptor Editor (CDE) (see Chapter 1, Component Descriptor Editor User's Guide). This tool can be configured to automatically launch JCasGen whenever the type system descriptor is modified. In this release, this operation completely regenerates the files, even if just a small thing changed. For very large type systems, you probably don't want to enable this all the time. The configurator tool has an option to enable/disable this function.

The PEAR Eclipse plugin is automatically installed if you followed the directions in Chapter 3, Setting up the Eclipse IDE to work with UIMA in UIMA Overview & SDK Setup. The use of the plugin involves the following two steps:

7.1.1. Add UIMA Nature to your project

First, create a project for your UIMA component:

• Create a Java project, which would contain all the files and folders needed for your UIMA component.

• Create a source folder called “src” in your project, and make it the only source folder, by clicking on “Properties” in your project's context menu (right-click), then select “Java Build Path”, then add the “src” folder to the source folders list, and remove any other folder from the list.

• Specify an output folder for your project called bin, by clicking on “Properties” in your project's context menu (right-click), then select “Java Build Path”, and specify “your_project_name/bin” as the default output folder.

Then, add the UIMA nature to your project by clicking on “Add UIMA Nature” in the context menu (right-click) of your project. Click “Yes” on the “Adding UIMA custom Nature” dialog box. Click “OK” on the confirmation dialog box.

Adding the UIMA nature to your project creates the PEAR structure in your project. The PEAR structure is a structured tree of folders and files, including the following elements:

• Required Elements:

  • The metadata folder which contains the PEAR installation descriptor and properties files.

  • The installation descriptor ( metadata/install.xml)

• Optional Elements:

  • The desc folder to contain descriptor files of analysis engines, component analysis engines (all levels), and other component (Collection Readers, CAS Consumers, etc).

  • The src folder to contain the source code

  • The bin folder to contain executables, scripts, class files, dlls, shared libraries, etc.

  • The lib folder to contain jar files.

  • The doc folder containing documentation materials, preferably accessible through an index.html.

  • The data folder to contain data files (e.g. for testing).

  • The conf folder to contain configuration files.

  • The resources folder to contain other resources and dependencies.

  • Other user-defined folders or files are allowed, but should be avoided.

For more information about the PEAR structure, please refer to the “Processing Engine Archive” section.

Figure 7.1. The Pear Structure

7.1.2. Using the PEAR Generation Wizard

Before using the PEAR Generation Wizard, add all the files needed to run your component including descriptors, jars, external libraries, resources, and component analysis engines (in the case of an aggregate analysis engine), etc. Do not add Jars for the UIMA framework, however. Doing so will cause class loading problems at run time.

If you're using a Java IDE like Eclipse, instead of using the output folder (usually bin as the source of your classes, it's recommended that you generate a Jar file containing these classes.

Then, click on “Generate PEAR file” from the context menu (right-click) of your project, to open the PEAR Generation wizard, and follow the instructions on the wizard to generate the PEAR file.

7.1.2.1. The Component Information page

The first page of the PEAR generation wizard is the component information page. Specify in this page a component ID for your PEAR and select the main Analysis Engine descriptor. The descriptor must be specified using a pathname relative to the project's root (e.g. “desc/MyAE.xml”). The component id is a string that uniquely identifies the component. It should use the JAVA naming convention (e.g. org.apache.uima.mycomponent).

Optionally, you can include specific Collection Iterator, CAS Initializer (deprecated as of Version 2.1), or CAS Consumers. In this case, specify the corresponding descriptors in this page.

Figure 7.2. The Component Information Page

7.1.2.2. The Installation Environment page

The installation environment page is used to specify the following:

• Preferred operating system

• Required JDK version, if applicable.

• Required Environment variable settings. This is where you specify special CLASSPATH paths. You do not need to specify this for any Jar that is listed in the your eclipse project classpath settings; those are automatically put into the generated CLASSPATH. Nor should you include paths to the UIMA Framework itself, here. Doing so may cause class loading problems.

  CLASSPATH segments are written here using a semicolon ";" as the separator; during PEAR installation, these will be adjusted to be the correct character for the target Operating System.

  In order to specify the UIMA datapath for your component you have to create an environment variable with the property name uima.datapath. The value of this property must contain the UIMA datapath settings.

Path names should be specified using macros (see below), instead of hard-coded absolute paths that might work locally, but probably won't if the PEAR is deployed in a different machine and environment.

Macros are variables such as $main_root, used to represent a string such as the full path of a certain directory.

These macros should be defined in the PEAR.properties file using the local values. The tools and applications that use and deploy PEAR files should replace these macros (in the files included in the conf and desc folders) with the corresponding values in the local environment as part of the deployment process.

Currently, there are two types of macros:

• $main_root, which represents the local absolute path of the main component root directory after deployment.

• $component_id$root, which represents the local absolute path to the root directory of the component which has component_id as component ID. This component could be, for instance, a delegate component.

Figure 7.3. The Installation Environment Page

7.1.2.3. The PEAR file content page

The last page of the wizard is the “PEAR file Export” page, which allows the user to select the files to include in the PEAR file. The metadata folder and all its content is mandatory. Make sure you include all the files needed to run your component including descriptors, jars, external libraries, resources, and component analysis engines (in the case of an aggregate analysis engine), etc. It's recommended to generate a jar file from your code as an alternative to building the project and making sure the output folder (bin) contains the required class files.

Eclipse compiles your class files into some output directory, often named "bin" when you take the usual defaults in Eclipse. The recommended practice is to take all these files and put them into a Jar file, perhaps using the Eclipse Export wizard. You would place that Jar file into the PEAR lib directory.

Note

If you are relying on the class files generated in the output folder (usually called bin) to run your code, then make sure the project is built properly, and all the required class files are generated without errors, and then put the output folder (e.g. $main_root/bin) in the classpath using the option to set environment variables, by setting the CLASSPATH variable to include this folder (see the “Installation Environment” page. Beware that using a Java output folder named "bin" in this case is a poor practice, because the PEAR installation tools will presume this folder contains binary executable files, and will adds this folder to the PATH environment variable.

Figure 7.4. The PEAR File Export Page

The PEAR command line packager takes some PEAR package parameter settings on the command line to create an UIMA PEAR file.

To run the PEAR command line packager you can use the provided runPearPackager (.bat for Windows, and .sh for Unix) scripts. The packager can be used in three different modes.

The modes 2 and 3 should be used when you want to manipulate the PEAR installation descriptor before packaging the PEAR file.

Some more details about the PearPackager parameters is provided in the list below:

The PEARs are merged using the following steps:

The PEAR merger utility logs all the operations both to standard console output and to a log file, pm.log, which is created in the current working directory.

The output PEAR file can be installed and tested using the PEAR Installer. The output aggregate component can also be tested by using the CVD or DocAnalyzer tools.

The PEAR Installer creates Eclipse project files (.classpath and .project) in the root directory of the installer PEAR, so the installed component can be imported into the Eclipse IDE as an external project. Once the component is in the Eclipse IDE, developers may use the Component Descriptor Editor and the PEAR Packager to modify the output aggregate descriptor and re-package the component.

The PEAR Merger utility only does basic merging operations, and is limited as follows. You can overcome these by editing the resulting PEAR file or the resulting Aggregate Descriptor.