The MAT UI requires that you be able to run a Web server. The Web
server software is included with the MAT distribution. Instructions for
starting and managing the Web server can be found here. The Web server may also start up
a second server for the Java Carafe engine, so that large tagging
models don't have to be loaded every time you request that a document
be tagged via the MAT UI.
We're aware that in some environments, you won't be able to run your
own Web server. Unfortunately, the resources we have to devote to MAT
do not permit us to create a server-free full version of MAT. Here's
what you won't be able to do, and how you might work around it:
Without the Web server, you
won't be able to hand-annotate documents. Obviously, if you're building
a corpus of annotated documents, and you don't have your own hand
annotation tool, you'll be out of luck. If you do have your own hand-annotation
tool, you have two options: either ensure that the tool can read or
write documents that MAT can understand, or augment MAT to understand
the format of the documents your annotation tool creates. There's a
Java API, for instance, that you can use to read and write MAT
documents, and there's documentation on the MAT document format.
However, your simplest option is most likely to read and write in-line
XML, if possible, since MAT has a fairly sophisticated understanding of
in-line XML. The documentation on readers
and writers will tell you more. (It's also possible to write a new
reader/writer and add it to MAT, but explaining how to do that is
beyond the scope of this documentation.)
Without the Web server, you won't able to control the MAT engine via the MAT UI to perform any automated processing of documents. This is not a huge problem, since all the MAT engine operations are available via the command line using the MATEngine tool.
Without the Web server, you
won't be able to view or control MAT
workspaces via the MAT UI. This is a bit more of a problem, since
the UI manages access to the workspaces during hand annotation. You'll
have to be sure you only annotate documents that reside in the relevant
folders in the MAT workspace, and save those documents back to the
workspace.
We can't guarantee that this is the extent of the consequences of
not being able to run the MAT Web server. We encourage you, if at all
possible, to find an environment, such as a virtual machine, where
you're permitted to run the server.