Interoperability and Customisation of Annotation Schemata in Argo

Abstract

The process of annotating text corpora involves establishing annotation schemata which define the scope and depth of an annotation task at hand. We demonstrate this activity in Argo, a Web-based workbench for the analysis of textual resources, which facilitates both automatic and manual annotation. Annotation tasks in the workbench are defined by building workflows consisting of a selection of available elementary analytics developed in compliance with the Unstructured Information Management Architecture specification. The architecture accommodates complex annotation types that may define primitive as well as referential attributes. Argo aids the development of custom annotation schemata and supports their interoperability by featuring a schema editor and specialised analytics for schemata alignment. The schema editor is a self-contained graphical user interface for defining annotation types. Multiple heterogeneous schemata can be aligned by including one of two type mapping analytics currently offered in Argo. One is based on a simple mapping syntax and, although limited in functionality, covers most common use cases. The other utilises a well established graph query language, SPARQL, and is superior to other state-of-the-art solutions in terms of expressiveness. We argue that the customisation of annotation schemata does not need to compromise their interoperability.

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