Alternative format to Brat for storing and viewing JCases

[Alain Désilets]

At the beginning of my project we decided to adopt brat files as our "native" file format, because we we and our users were already familiar with Brat.

But we keep bumping into all sorts of difficulties related to the DKPro BratReader/Writer which seems to be very brittle and unforgiving.

I was wondering if there is an alternative format for which there is better read/write support in DKPro. 

If we are to switch to a different format, we would need to also switch to a different app than Brat for viewing the annotations. I have looked at Inception but I find it too complex for our simple needs. 

Thx.

[Richard Eckart de Castilho]

> On 4. Dec 2019, at 15:50, Alain Désilets <alainde...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was wondering if there is an alternative format for which there is better read/write support in DKPro.

None that brat would support I guess.

Brat doesn't have any pre-defined annotation schema. So whenever you transfer data between brat and something else which needs to know what data is in there (e.g. what is a named entity and so on), you'll need to perform some kind of project-specific mapping. The BratReader aims to offer a flexible mapping scheme, but as you said, it is not perfect.

You could implement your own reader for your specific flavor of brat, your project-specific type system and which knows supports your project-specific quirks. Writing a reader for brat in general is not difficult. You can probably just re-use the basic data objects from the DKPro Core Reader which can be used to parse the brat files. What's tricky is the mapping.

Cheers,

-- Richard

[Alain Désilets]

OK, so it sounds like Brat is still my best bet.

I will create a different post illustrating the latest problem I am having with the BratReader/Writer