1. If users are not relying on GATE to produce the standoff notation, what tools are they using? This completely depends on the application area. As stand-off annotation is mostly used in research environments, in-house developed systems are quite common.
2. If I send you a simple GATE format XML, could you give me an estimate of how difficult it would be to get working with MonetDB's standoff extension? Sure. But note that MonetDB/XQuery is a database system (it can basically store and query any XML document).
3. Given the implementation of standoff that you describe, can a user access the span of text demarcated by the start and end character positions? For example, could I check if a certain regular expression pattern appeared within the text span? Much of my analysis will involve comparing both the annotations and the text itself. There is currently no function in MonetDB/XQuery visible for users. The codebase does contain a non-used function 'so-blob()', which fetches specific regions from the data document. Note that you should be careful here; as it uses byte-position offsets which are not necessarily the same as character-position offsets.
4. Finally, are there any front-ends available for MonetDB that would enable me to edit/update XML content in a way that hides levels of detail that I don't need to see at times? Or, that would allow me to save, reload, and execute queries quickly? MonetDB/XQuery does not contain front-ends other than developer/system-administrator front-ends. MonetDB/XQuery can be easily queried in XQuery using JDBC, XRPC, and via the command-line (mclient). I am not aware of any third-party solutions that have a specialized integration with MonetDB/XQuery.
thank you again, -david
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