Interoperability with Salt, Pepper and ANNIS #85
Description
This issue came up in discussions with @luutuntin who was looking for a search and retrieval tool capable of handling FoLiA. There is some FoLiA support in both Blacklab and MTAS, but both may not sufficiently cover all of FoLiA's expressive abilities (tree handling in particular).
ANNIS is another well-developed and interesting solution, but right now there is no FoLiA support. ANNIS relies on a conversion tool called Pepper to support a great variety of input formats. Pepper in turn uses a low-level graph-based model called Salt as its intermediate model, which in turn can export to a variety of formats again (including ANNIS' format).
To enhance interoperability, it would be a good idea to implement conversion from FoLiA to the salt model (and possibly vice versa, but with much less priority)
To write such a converter we could:
- implement it as an extension to Pepper, however: Pepper and Salt are all Java-based, but we have no proper java-based FoLiA library (and I'm very reluctant to start one, we already have extensive libraries for Python, C++ and Rust).
- Implement it as a standalone tool, possibly serialising to SaltXML . This allows us to leverage an existing FoLiA library (although we lose the benefit of the Salt library), and keeps things a bit simpler.
Update: we are picking option 2