[RESULT][VOTE] Accept OpenNLP for incubation

[Jörn Kottmann <ko...@gmail.com>]

The vote passes with the 17 +1  votes (8 binding), no -1 votes.

Binding (8):
Jukka Zitting
Bertrand Delacretaz
Grant Ingersoll
Michael McCandless
Matt Benson
Doug Cutting
Benson Margulies
Alan Cabrera

Non-Binding (9):
Tommaso Teofili
Thilo Götz
Marshall Schor
Nick Kew
Marcel Offermans
Mohammad Nour El-Din
Andreas Kuckartz
Otis Gospodnetic
Isabel Drost

Thanks for voting,
Jörn

On 11/19/10 10:48 AM, Jörn Kottmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> lets vote on the acceptance of the OpenNLP Project for incubation
> at the Apache Incubator.
>
> The proposal is on the wiki
> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenNLPProposal
> and a copy is included below.
>
> The discussion thread can be found here:
> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201011.mbox/%3C4CE4F1F4.3010909@gmail.com%3E 
>
>
> Please cast your votes:
>
> [ ] +1 Accept OpenNLP for incubation
> [ ] +0 Don't care
> [ ] -1 Reject for the following reason:
>
> The vote is open for at least 72 hours.
>
> Thanks!
> Jörn
>
> = OpenNLP Proposal =
> The following is a proposal for a new top-level project within the ASF.
>
> == Abstract ==
> OpenNLP is a Java machine learning toolkit for natural language 
> processing (NLP).
>
> == Proposal ==
> OpenNLP is a machine learning based toolkit for the processing of 
> natural language text.  It supports the most common NLP tasks, such as 
> tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named 
> entity extraction, chunking, parsing, and coreference resolution.  
> These tasks are usually required to build more advanced text 
> processing services.
>
> The goal of the OpenNLP project will be to create a mature toolkit for 
> the abovementioned tasks.  An additional goal is to provide a large 
> number of pre-built models for a variety of languages, as well as the 
> annotated text resources that those models are derived from.
>
> == Background ==
> OpenNLP was started in 2000 by Jason Baldridge and Gann Bierner while 
> they were graduate students in the Division of Informatics at the 
> University of Edinburgh. OpenNLP, broadly speaking, was meant to be a 
> high-level organizational unit for various open source software 
> packages for natural language processing; more practically, it 
> provided a high-level package name for various Java packages of the 
> form opennlp.*. The first OpenNLP software package was the Grok 
> natural language parsing toolkit, which was also the genesis of what 
> is now called the OpenNLP Toolkit. The software released on the 
> OpenNLP sourceforge site (started in 2000, along with Grok) was simply 
> a set of interfaces defined in the package opennlp.common and referred 
> to as the OpenNLP Java API. The actual implementations of natural 
> language processing components were provided in Grok, along with code 
> for sentence parsing with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. This code 
> was used heavily in both Baldridge's and Biern
> er's dissertations. The first paper that used Grok, and especially the 
> components that would become the OpenNLP Toolkit is 
> [[http://comp.ling.utexas.edu/jbaldrid/papers/hockenmaier_etal_ESSLLI2000.pdf|Hockenmaier, 
> Bierner and Baldridge (2000)]] (later updated as the journal article 
> [[http://comp.ling.utexas.edu/jbaldrid/papers/HockenmaierEtal2004.pdf|Hockenmaier, 
> Bierner, and Baldridge (2004)]]).
>
> In 2003, it was decided to remove the NLP infrastructure from Grok as 
> there was a clear separation between the basic text processing 
> components and the syntactic and semantic analysis components. At the 
> same time, Grok was rebranded as OpenCCG (openccg.sf.net). The final 
> release of the OpenNLP Java API was made in March 2003; the new 
> OpenNLP Toolkit was created from the API and the Grok text processing 
> components, with version 1.0 being released in April 2004. The OpenNLP 
> Toolkit and OpenCCG have evolved independently since then and have 
> mostly independent and active developer and user communities. OpenCCG 
> is primarily used in the academic community, while OpenNLP has 
> considerable use in both academia and industry. As in indication of 
> the academic impact of OpenNLP, a search on Google scholar (done in 
> March 2010) returned about 650 publications citing the package. Some 
> of these include the OpenNLP website and a few non-publications plus 
> some self-citations. Based on a scan of
>  these results, we estimate that about 500 actual publications have 
> used OpenNLP in their work, and there are an addition 50 or so 
> quasi-publications like surveys and instruction manuals.
>
> The activity level of the OpenNLP project has fluctuated over that 
> past 10+ years, with a large uptick in the last two years especially. 
> Most recently, due both to the availability of new documentation and 
> the release of version 1.5 , there have been many more downloads and 
> page views for the OpenNLP project. In fact, September 2010 had the 
> most downloads (1,561) and project web hits (226,391) of any month 
> since the project's beginning in 2000, and October is keeping pacing 
> with that figure so far. As a result, OpenNLP has gone from being in 
> the 2000th to 4000th ranked project (between January and May, 2010) to 
> being ranked 570, 314, 181 and 439 for July, August, September, and 
> October respectively. Full details are available on the Sourceforge 
> statistics page for OpenNLP.  (There are 240,000 projects hosted on 
> SourceForge, though this figure includes many, many projects that 
> never actually get started: it seems that about 7-10% of these are 
> stable, active projects base
> d on a review done in 2007.)
>
> == Rationale ==
> OpenNLP fills a significant gap at the ASF in regards to human 
> language processing tools.  While Lucene/Solr, UIMA and Mahout all 
> have some tools in this area, none of them are solely focused on tools 
> specifically for working with natural language like OpenNLP.
>
> == Initial Goals ==
> The initial goals of the proposed project are:
>
>  * Bring the community together at the ASF and make the development 
> process transparent for them
>  * Write user documentation about all major components
>  * Automated build including train and evaluate regression tests
>  * Produce an Incubating release
>
> == Current Status ==
> === Meritocracy ===
> Some of the initial committers are familiar with Apache's idea of 
> meritocracy, others aren't.  We will get everybody on the same level 
> as part of the incubation process.
>
> === Community ===
> OpenNLP already has a considerable user base, both in industry and 
> academia.
>
> === Core Developers ===
> See the initial committer list.
>
> === Alignment ===
> OpenNLP has tie-ins with several existing Apache projects.  We have 
> been distributing wrappers for UIMA for some time now (two UIMA 
> committers also contribute to OpenNLP).  We expect this collaboration 
> to strengthen further after our move to Apache.
>
> Another obvious connection exists to some of the projects under the 
> Lucene umbrella.  On the one hand, projects like Solr may benefit from 
> the OpenNLP analysis capabilities to create specialized search for 
> particular domains.  On the other, OpenNLP may benefit from the 
> machine learning code that is being developed in Mahout, and maybe get 
> some people from that community to lend a hand.
>
> == Known Risks ==
> === Orphaned products ===
> The project has been around for quite a number of years already, it 
> has a well-established user community and a diverse set of committers.
>
> === Inexperience with Open Source ===
> OpenNLP has been an open source project for quite some time.  Many of 
> the developers are already familiar with both open source in general 
> and the ASF in particular.
>
> === Homogenous Developers ===
> The current group of developers is very diverse, no two developers 
> work for the same organization.
>
> === Reliance on Salaried Developers ===
> Most of the developers are not paid to work on OpenNLP, so there is 
> little reliance on salaried developers.
>
> === Relationships with Other Apache Products ===
> NLP is often used in search and other algorithms that work with 
> unstructured data, thus OpenNLP is likely to be useful to the Lucene 
> and Solr communities.  It also aligns nicely with both Mahout and UIMA.
>
> === A Excessive Fascination with the Apache Brand ===
> We think the project aligns nicely with the goals of the ASF to 
> disseminate source code to the public free of charge.  NLP has long 
> been the subject of cutting edge research, but is often lacking in 
> community and shared knowledge.  We believe that by bringing OpenNLP 
> to the ASF, the Apache brand will help deliver NLP capabilities to a 
> much larger audience and likewise a cutting edge project like OpenNLP 
> can further the ASF brand by providing users with tried and true, as 
> well as new, natural language processing capabilities.
>
> == Documentation ==
>  *http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/README.html
>  *http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/opennlp/index.php?title=Main_Page
>
> == Initial Source ==
> The source code is maintained in two CVS repositories on SourceForge.
>
> OpenNLP Maxent:http://maxent.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/maxent/
>
> OpenNLP Tools and OpenNLP 
> UIMA:http://opennlp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/opennlp/
>
> == Source and Intellectual Property Submission Plan ==
> The OpenNLP source code is already open source under the AL 2.0.
>
> == External Dependencies ==
> ||'''Library''' ||||<style="text-align: center;">'''License''' 
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">'''Description''' ||
> ||JWNL ||||<style="text-align: center;">BSD ||||<style="text-align: 
> center;">Java Wordnet Library ||
> ||JUnit ||||<style="text-align: center;">CPL ||||<style="text-align: 
> center;">Unit Testing Framework ||
> ||UIMA ||||<style="text-align: center;">AL 2.0 ||||<style="text-align: 
> center;">Unstructured Information Management Architecture ||
>
>
> == Cryptography ==
> OpenNLP neither provides nor uses any cryptography.
>
> == Required Resources ==
> === Mailing lists ===
>  * opennlp-dev
>  * opennlp-private
>  * opennlp-user
>  * opennlp-commits
>
> === Subversion Directory ===
> https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/opennlp
>
> === Issue Tracking ===
> Jira: OPENNLP
>
> === Other Resources ===
> == Initial Committers ==
> ||'''Name''' ||||<style="text-align: center;">'''Email''' 
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">'''CLA''' ||
> ||Thilo Goetz ||||<style="text-align: center;"> twgoetz@apache.org  
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
> ||Grant Ingersoll ||||<style="text-align: center;"> 
> gsingers@apache.org  ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
> ||Jörn Kottmann ||||<style="text-align: center;"> joern@apache.org  
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
> ||Thomas Morton ||||<style="text-align: center;"> tsmorton@gmail.com  
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">no ||
> ||William Silva ||||<style="text-align: center;"> 
> william.colen@gmail.com  ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
> ||Jason Baldridge ||||<style="text-align: center;"> 
> jasonbaldridge@gmail.com  ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
> ||James Kosin ||||<style="text-align: center;"> james.kosin@gmail.com  
> ||||<style="text-align: center;">yes ||
>
>
> == Affiliations ==
> ||'''Name''' ||||<style="text-align: center;">'''Affiliation''' ||
> ||Thilo Goetz ||||<style="text-align: center;">IBM ||
> ||Grant Ingersoll ||||<style="text-align: center;">Lucid Imagination ||
> ||Jörn Kottmann ||||<style="text-align: center;">Infopaq International 
> A/S ||
> ||Thomas Morton ||||<style="text-align: center;">Comcast Corporation ||
> ||William Silva ||||<style="text-align: center;">São Paulo University ||
> ||Jason Baldridge ||||<style="text-align: center;">The University of 
> Texas at Austin ||
> ||James Kosin ||||<style="text-align: center;">International 
> Communications Group, Inc. ||
>
>
> == Sponsors ==
> === Champion ===
> Grant Ingersoll
>
> === Nominated Mentors ===
> Isabel Drost
>
> Grant Ingersoll
>
> Benson Margulies
>
>
>
> === Sponsoring Entity ===
> The Apache Incubator
>
>
>



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