Revised Design Goals of Behavioral Metadata Section, to be voted on today

Everyone,

On the last UIMA telecon it was
agreed that I would revise the Design Goals section of the Behaviroa Metadata
spec element based on our discussions.  Here is that revision, which
we may vote on in today's telecon:

The Behavioral Metadata of an analytic
declaratively describes what the analytic does; for example, what types
of CASs it can process, what elements in a CAS it analyzes, and what sorts
of effects it may have on CAS contents as a result of its application.

The primary goals that this spec
element is trying to achieve are:

1. Support composition either by
a human developer or an automated process. 

a. Analytics should be able to
declare what they do in enough detail to assist manual and/or automated
processes in considering their role in an application or in the composition
of aggregate analytics.

b. Analytics’ Behavioral Metadata
should enable an application or aggregate to detect “invalid” compositions/workflows
(e.g., a workflow where it can be determined that one of the Analytic’s
preconditions can never be satisfied by the preceding Analytic).

2. Facilitate efficient sharing
of CAS content among cooperating analytics. If analytics declare which
elements of the CAS (e.g., views) they need to receive and which
elements they do not need to receive, the CAS can be filtered or split
prior to sending it to target analytics, to achieve transport and parallelization
efficiencies respectively.

3. Provide a mechanism for the
caller of an Analytic to direct that Analytic to operate on a subset of
the CAS.  For example, an Analytic’s Behavioral Metadata says it
can analyze any object of type TextDocument (that is, TextDocument is the
type of Sofa that it accepts).  The CAS may contain multiple TextDocuments.
 The caller may want do direct the analytic to process only one of
them.

Here's my full summary document for
the Behavioral Metadata element, updated to include these goals:

-Adam

_____________________________

 Adam Lally

 Advisory Software Engineer 

 UIMA Framework Lead Developer

 IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

 Hawthorne, NY, 10532

 Tel: 914-784-7706,  T/L: 863-7706

 

BehavioralMetadata_summary_v2.doc