The Curator
===========

The Curator is a system that acts as a central server in providing annotations
for text.  It is responsible for requesting annotations from multiple natural
language processing servers, caching and storing previous annotations and
refreshing stale annotations.  The Curator provides a centralized resource which
the requests annotations for natural language text.

Interfaces
----------

The Curator architecture defines multiple data types and service interfaces for
creating new annotation servers and communicating with the Curator.  The
interfaces are defined using [Apache Thrift][thrift] which provides a software
stack and code generation for cross-language deployment. This allows annotation
servers and Curator clients to be written in multiple language.  Currently
Thrift supports C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa,
Smalltalk, and OCaml.

`docs/interfaces` describe the interfaces and data structures used within the
Curator architecture.

[thrift]: http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

Annotators
----------

The Curator packages comes bundled with annotators capable of performing the
following annotations:

 * Tokenization and Sentence Splitting (via Illinois NLP tools)
 * Part-of-speech tags (via Illinois POS Tagger)
 * Chunk (shallow parse) analysis (via Illinois Chunker)
 * Named Entities (via Illinois Named Entity Recognizer)
 * Coreference (via Illinois Coreference package)
 * Parse trees (via Stanford Parser)
 * Dependency trees (via Stanford Parser)


Installation and Running
------------------------

See the INSTALL and QUICKSTART for getting started.

Learn more
----------

To learn more about the Curator server and annotation servers check the README
files in `docs`.

If you are interested in using the Curator as a user we recommend you read
[CuratorDemo.java][1] in `client-examples/java`.

[1]: http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/curator/CuratorDemo.html