Re: [uima] "Assignment Style" vs. "Functional Style"

[Thilo W Goetz <TGOETZ@de.ibm.com>]

See inline comments below.

Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best regards

Thilo Goetz
OmniFind & UIMA development
Information Management Division
IBM Germany
+49-7031-16-1758

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Adam Lally <alally@us.ibm.com> wrote on 05/09/2007
22:43:50:

> ...
> On the "non-enforceable" point, a service that doesn't reuse
any 
> input IDs would be considered to have deleted everything in the CAS
> and created a bunch of new stuff.  In itself that doesn't make
it 
> non-compliant with UIMA, but it would need to declare this behavior
> in its metadata.  A service which declares that it "modifies
> instances of type Foo" would not be allowed to change the xmi:id's
> on those instances or it would be considered to not comply with its
> own behavioral metadata.   

I expect the behavioral metadata to see just as much
use as our current input/output
type declarations.  For most people it will be
too complicated to figure out, and
they'll just use the setting that allows them to do
whatever they like.

> 
> However, perhaps this allows the service that cannot guarantee a 
> procedural behavior to still be UIMA-compliant - it just has to 
> declare its behavior appropriately.  (Another possibility is
that 
> such a service is a CAS Multiplier.  CAS Multipliers are expected
to
> create completely new CASes and so might be a natural fit for this
> kind of service.) 
> 
> Also I think if we say that there is no notion that an annotation
is
> an object, then the TC needs to go back and revisit the earlier 
> sections of the whitepaper which explicitly say that the CAS is an
> object graph, and revisit our decisions to use OMG standards which
> are fundamentally object-based. 

Indeed.  The object analogy is fine as long as
it's useful.  If and when
we take it too far, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
 If we can use OMG tools
and standards because they do what we need, that's
great.  If they make
us change the way we think about CAS data, we need
to consider carefully
if the benefit is worth it.  You know my opinion.
 See my "multipleReferencesAllowed"
pet peeve.

> 
> Regards, 
> -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
> alally@us.ibm.com 
>