WebAnno - Brat- and UIMA-based annotation tool (early preview)

[Richard Eckart de Castilho <ri...@gmail.com>]

Hi everybody,

some time back there was some talk about a UIMA persistence layer. At the time I mention, that we were working on a web-based annotation tool which uses UIMA and the CAS as its persistence layer. Meanwhile, we have moved the project to Google Code and we are happy to announce

===============================================
WebAnno
A Flexible, Web-based and Visually Supported
System for Distributed Annotations

https://code.google.com/p/webanno/
===============================================

Please consider this as an early preview. We already use WebAnno in annotation projects, but some features are still very early prototypes or not even implemented at all.

WebAnno uses technology from Brat [1] for visualizing and editing annotations in a web browser and adds pagination to support large documents. We wrapped the Brat stuff as a Wicket component, which works great but still has some rough edges ;)

For importing and exporting data, UIMA components from the DKPro Core [2] project (readers and writers) can be used.

Most of the tool is still hard-coded to the DKPro Core UIMA type system, but we are currently working towards a configurable type system.

Data is currently stored in the binary CAS format provided by UIMA 2.4.0. We are looking forward to integrating the latest work of Marshall on the binary CAS storage.

Meta data is stored in an SQL database via JPA/Hibernate - currently we work with MySQL.

The project is released under the Apache Software License 2.0.

If you try WebAnno, we'd be love to hear comments and feedback.

Btw. the persistence for CAS data (and current for most of the rest of the data) is done via the class
RepositoryServiceDbData.

Cheers,

-- Richard

[1] http://brat.nlplab.org
[2] http://code.google.com/p/dkpro-core-asl/