GATE.ac.uk - releases/gate-5.0-beta1-build3048-ALL/doc/releases.html

GATE 5.0 beta1 (build 3048), October 31st 2008

The first beta of GATE 5.0 is now available for download (follow the download link from http://gate.ac.uk/download). The core of this release is stable but the newer features may have bugs.

GATE 4.0 (build 2752), July 12th 2007

GATE version 4 is now available for download from Sourceforge (follow the download link from http://gate.ac.uk/download).

Version 4 includes major new facilities for annotation indexing and search, machine learning, scaleable ontology support from OWLIM (http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/ ), ontology-based document annotation, and parallel corpus alignment. There is a raft of efficiency and infrastructure improvements including revamped HTML handling, Java 5 support and numerous optimisations and bug fixes. The set of plugins available has expanded to include around 150 components, which integrate with many high-quality language processing tools from the wider research community (http://gate.ac.uk/gate/doc/plugins.html).

GATE is free and open (under the LGPL licence) and you are very welcome to use it for both commercial and research purposes. A number of businesses now use GATE in production applications, from large corporates like Thompson to startups like Garlik or Innovantage. Research, teaching and student users represent a high proportion of labs working on language and knowledge worldwide.

Plans for the future include:

a new version of the JAPE finite state annotation processing language
more and better integration with related systems and tools
SAFE, the Semantic Annotation Factory Environment: http://gate.ac.uk/safe/

See the changelog for more details.

GATE is developed on Ubuntu (and other less advanced operating systems).

GATE 3.1 (build 2270), April 7th 2006

This is the final release of version 3.1.

New features in 3.1 (see also next section) include:

UIMA interoperability layer, paid for by IBM's TJ Watson labs (thanks folks!)
a revised and reworked ontology abstraction API that generalises over Sesame, JENA and KAON for language technology purposes
OntoText's new JAPE compiler, which makes ANNIE run 200% as fast as previously and in general achieves JAPE speed-ups of 2-5 times.

...and a whole bunch of bug fixes!

There are a few backwards incompatibilities (see the changelog for more details).

GATE 3.1 beta 1 (build 2168), December 16th 2005

This is the first release (beta 1) of version 3.1. This core of this release is stable, but some new features may have bugs, and there are some backwards incompatibilities (see the changelog for more details).

New features in 3.1 include:

UIMA interoperability layer, paid for by IBM's TJ Watson labs (thanks folks!)
a revised and reworked ontology abstraction API that generalises over Sesame, JENA and KAON for language technology purposes
OntoText's new JAPE compiler, which makes ANNIE run 200% as fast as previously

...and a whole bunch of bug fixes!

GATE 3.0 (build 1846), January 14th 2005

This is the final release of version 3.0. This is a stable release and supercedes all previous versions.

New features include:

completely rewritten document viewer/editor
extensive ontology support
a new plugin management system
lots more CREOLE plugins, including Chemistry Tagger, Montreal Transducer, RASP Parser, MiniPar, Buchart Parser, MinorThird, NP Chunker, Stemmer, TreeTagger, Probability Finder, Crawler, Google PR, SVM Light, ...
faster JAPE compiles, and removal of dependency on Sun Java compiler
separate .jar files and Tomcat classloading fixes
transparent XML-based application serialisation

See chapter 2 (Change Log) of the User Guide for full details of what has changed.

Compatibility: for version 3 we decided that it was worthwhile making a few incompatible changes in order to clean up a couple of things that have caused trouble in previous versions. For example: some recent classes have been renamed (particularly the ontologies support classes); a few new events have been added; datastores created by version 3 will probably not read properly in version 2. If you have problems use the mailing list and we'll help you fix your code!

Version 3.1 will be a bug fix and minor adjustments to new features release; send us your comments.

GATE is free software, developed using public research funds. If you find it useful, don't keep it a secret!

Thought for the day: did you know that if Walt Disney was working now, most of his films would be illegal? Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or take a look at Lessig's Free Culture.

GATE 3.0 (build 1810, Release Candidate 1), December 7th 2004

Since beta 1 of version 3 we have stabilised the system, and made all pre-release final changes. This RC1 release is for testing of the installation routines and backwards compatibility analysis. Please report all bugs and errors. Version 3.0 FCS will be very early 2005.

GATE 3.0 (build 1717, Beta 1), August 6th 2004

This release is dedicated to the memory of Jeremy Black (main instigator of the ETCSL projects).

This is the latest release (is it not production quality). The user guide. The developer documentation. The download page.

See chapter 2 (Change Log) of the User Guide for full details of what has changed.

Highlights

New features include:

completely rewritten document viewer/editor
extensive ontology support
a new plugin management system
separate .jar files and a Tomcat classloading fix
lots more CREOLE components (and some more to come soon)

Compatibility

For version 3 we decided that it was worthwhile making a few incompatible changes in order to clean up a few things that have caused trouble in previous versions. For example: some recent classes have been renamed (particularly the ontologies support classes) and a few events added (see below); datastores created by version 3 will probably not read properly in version 2. If you have problems use the mailing list and we'll help you fix your code!

Contributions

A big "thank you" to the following contributors of new code to this release (please let me know if I missed you out!):

OntoText for contributing the OntoGazetteer and various other components: http://www.ontotext.com/
Ontos International AG for the new JAPE debugger: http://www.ontosearch.com/en/company/.
Mark Greenwood for several CREOLE components: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mark
Angus Roberts for several CREOLE components: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~angus/software.html.
Luc Plamondon for the Montreal transducer [not bundled in beta 1]: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~plamondl/mtltransducer/.
Media Style for the CoNLL ANNIE wrapper.
Osamu Masutani of Denso IT Laboratory, Inc. for many useful suggestions.

See also

Melandra, whose Peter Crowther sometimes helps out on the mailing list
David Corney's BioRAT GATE/ANNIE/JAPE-based bio-informatics extraction tool.
Thanks to Ian Roberts for lots of hard thinking about class loaders: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~ian
The Open University's AquaLog system
Medwrite Inc.'s medical informatics systems