UIMA TC Telecon Reminder: March 14 2008

Hi all,

We are on for tomorrow.

Adam has put our specification document
in the OASIS required template. Attached below and upload to our site.

Other than any questions or comments
you may have on recent drafts, we will bring your attention to section
3.4.7 --  the Formal Specification for the Abstract Interfaces.  

Based on our last discussion around
formalizing some notion for compliance to the Abstract Interfaces,  Adam
 attempted  to specify what it means for an implementation to
conform at this level.  

As discussed,  this is a balancing
act since we want to keep the abstract interfaces independent of any specific
binding, but at the same time constrain all implementations to implement
the operations we would expect on any given UIMA-compliant interface.  So
for example, we want to say that a service MUST  implement a "getMetadata"
operation, but we don't want to specify that it has to respond to this
with the XML text representation of the metadata.  That wouldn't allow
for a more efficient binary representation (like Apache UIMA's Vinci protocol),
or a direct Java binding.   

This draft tries to walk this line -
while for an arbitrary implementation the getMetaData call is not required
to return the standard XML representation, it must be possible to transform
the result of that call to the standard XML representation.  The service
provider must document how that transformation is done.  (An open
 question for the TC: we could go one step further and require the
service provider to provide a software component that performs the transformation?)

Note,  that while this may sound
weaker than what we have put forth for the WSDL/SOAP binding, the overall
spec said little about how other sorts of implementations would have to
comply to the definition of the abstract interfaces. So this is an attempt
to make the overall spec stronger. 

Call in Info

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David A. Ferrucci, PhD

Senior Manager, Semantic Analysis & Integration 

Chief Architect,  UIMA

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532

Tel: 914-784-7847, 8/863-7847



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http://www.ibm.com/research/uima  

uima-spec-wd-01.doc