The GATE Community

1. Meeting points and community support

After 15 years of giving away GATE and supporting its use, there are a lot of people who know our system. This community is one of the key benefits of getting to know GATE, and everyone is welcome.

Places to meet G8Rs, get help, share experience and so on:

• FIG, the international GATE symposium, is the best place to meet up with other users and developers of GATE
  • the training track is an intensive week-long tutorial with modules covering every aspect of GATE and its applications
  • the contributor track is a week for the developer team to get together and share the same router, barstool, etc.
• the mailing list is the first port of call for all community support requests
• GATE workshops at conferences
• the London GATE users group

2. Getting help (1)

• key documentation from Sheffield
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • the User Guide
  • screen cams
  • wiki examples code and guides
  • papers / theory
  • glossy
  • API (Javadoc)
  • core CREOLE plugins list
• documentation elsewhere
  • JAPE tutorial from the Press Association
  • Building Search Apps with Lucene, Lingpipe and GATE (Konchady)
• the mailing list
  • the archives on GMane, or on SourceForge (subscribe/unsubscribe)
• it's hell being a nerd... just when you've figured out wikis...
  • GATE on Twitter
  • GATE on Facebook

3. Getting help (2)

• send us 3 years' pocket money and your stamp collection
  • you can buy extremely good value R&D projects from The University of Sheffield (not, yet, PLC)
  • Ontotext.com sell custom software development, ontological data modelling and semantic annotation

4. Helping (1): bugs, feature requests

• Use the tracker on SourceForge
  • http://sourceforge.net/projects/gate/support
• Give as much detail as possible
  • GATE version, build number, platform, Java version (1.5.0_15, 1.6.0_03, etc.)
• Steps to reproduce
• Full stack trace of any exceptions, including "Caused by..."
• Check whether the bug is already fixed in the latest nightly build

5. Helping (2): patches

• Use the patches tracker on SourceForge
• Best format is an svn diff against the latest subversion
• Save the diff as a file and attach it, don't paste the diff into the bug report.
• We generally don't accept patches against earlier versions
• Advantageous to test on Java 1.6 as well as later versions
• Make a contribution, become a committer

6. Helping (3): updating the User Guide

• Everything in GATE is (theoretically) documented in the GATE User Guide: /userguide
• Every change to the core should be mentioned in the change log: /userguide/chap:changes
• User guide is written in LaTeX, lives in subversion https://gate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gate/userguide/trunk
• Either: send us a patch, or wave your magic wand and:
  • install pdflatex, htlatex (tex4ht package), sed, make, etc.
  • on Windows, install Cygwin
  • download sale/big.bib and put in directory above the .tex files
  • edit the .tex files
  • graphics, screenshots, etc. should be .png
  • check in changes to .tex files
• The PDF and HTML are regenerated automatically by...

7. Jenkins: tracking stability

• Continuous integration platform
• Automatically rebuilds GATE and user guide (among others) whenever they change
• Also does a clean build of GATE every night
• Nightly builds published at download/snapshots
• Junit test results available for each build
• GATE's Jenkins space