New GATE Releases (14 February 2012)

We are announcing the release of the following new GATE software versions.

1. GATE Developer / Embedded 7.0

At the core of many pieces of GATE software sits the GATE Embedded library. It provides infrastructural support for working with text and annotations. Also included is a large collection of ready-made tools for various processing tasks. GATE Developer is an integrated development environment for text analysis pipelines that provides user-friendly access to the facilities offered by the Embedded library.

GATE Developer and Embedded are distributed together and can be found on our download page.

Principal changes in version 7.0 include:

• a new CREOLE Plugin Manager user interface. This supports downloading new CREOLE plugins from remote update sites.
• JAPE_Plus: a new JAPE execution engine that includes various optimisations and should be significantly faster than the standard engine.
• improved support for processing biomedical text by adding new PRs to incorporate the following tools: AbGene, the NormaGene tagger, the GENIA sentence splitter, MutationFinder and the Penn BioTagger.

For a complete list, check the full change log.

2. GATE Mímir 4.0

GATE Mímir is a multi-paradigm information management index and repository which can be used to index and search over text, annotations, semantic schemas (ontologies), and semantic meta-data (instance data). It allows queries that arbitrarily mix full-text, structural, linguistic and semantic queries and that can scale to very large document collections (millions of documents or more, on appropriate hardware).

New in version 4.0:

• support for results ranking
• document-centric presentation of results
• new search APIs
• the mimir-client package now includes a new GATE Processing Resource that can be used to send documents for indexing to a Mímir server
• now licensed under LGPL (version 3)

For a full set of changes, please consult the change log chapter in the User Guide (PDF).

3. GATE Cloud Paralleliser (GCP) 2.2

GCP is a tool designed to support the execution of pipelines built using GATE Developer over large collections of thousands or millions of documents, using a multi-threaded architecture to make the best use of today's multi-core processors.

Changes include:

• compatibility with GATE Embedded 7.0
• compatibility with GATE Mímir 4.0
• backwards compatibility with GATE Mímir 3.x series
• now licensed under LGPL (version 3)

This version is now used for GATECloud.net Annotation Jobs.

4. GATECloud.net updates

GATECloud.net is a scalable pay-as-you-go service that makes GATE available in SaaS (Software as a Service) mode. There you can use GATE on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud via a simple point-and-click web tool to run analysis processes, index data with Mímir, and manage annotation projects using GATE Teamware.

Software services offered on GATECloud.net have been updated to use the newly released versions:

• a Mímir version 4.0 server distribution is now available;
• Annotation Jobs now use GCP version 2.2, and GATE Embedded 7.0.