Advanced workspace maintenance

MAT workspaces are quite powerful. We described the basics for individual users here, here, and here. We've covered importing documents, annotating them, building models, automated tagging, and correction, and also touched on workspace logging. In this document, we discuss some more advanced capabilities that the workspaces provide.

Multiple annotators

One of the major innovations in MAT 2.0 is that workspaces support multiple annotators. All annotation within workspaces is attributed to a particular human annotator, or to the automated tagging engine. This is not a security feature, and no security (e.g., a password) is associated with it; it's merely to partition responsibility. The usernames don't need to match your system username, but you might find it convenient to set them up that way. You can declare multiple annotators when you create a workspace:

Unix:

% $MAT_PKG_HOME/bin/MATWorkspaceEngine /tmp/ne_workspace create \
--task 'Named Entity' --initial_users user1,user2

Windows native:

> %MAT_PKG_HOME%\bin\MATWorkspaceEngine.cmd %TMP%\ne_workspace create \
--task "Named Entity" --initial_users "user1,user2"

or later:

Unix:

% $MAT_PKG_HOME/bin/MATWorkspaceEngine /tmp/ne_workspace \
register_users user1 user2

Windows native:

> %MAT_PKG_HOME%\bin\MATWorkspaceEngine.cmd %TMP%\ne_workspace \
register_users user1 user2

You can list the registered users with the list_users operation.

Document assignment

In the default situation, when you import a document, it's available for annotation by any of the workspace users (it's unassigned). You can change this by assigning a document to a user, and perhaps even to multiple users for duplicate annotation. You can assign a document to a user when you import it:

Unix:

% cd $MAT_PKG_HOME
% bin/MATWorkspaceEngine /tmp/ne_workspace import --strip_suffix ".txt" \
--file_type raw --assign --users user1,user2 \
"core" sample/ne/resources/data/raw/voa2.txt 

Windows native:

> cd %MAT_PKG_HOME%
> bin\MATWorkspaceEngine.cmd %TMP%\ne_workspace import --strip_suffix ".txt" \
--file_type raw --assign --users "user1,user2" \
"core" %CD%\sample\ne\resources\data\raw\voa2.txt

You can also assign a document after it's imported (but only if it hasn't been modified by a human yet):

Unix:

% $MAT_PKG_HOME/bin/MATWorkspaceEngine /tmp/ne_workspace assign \
--users user1,user2 voa2

Windows native:

> %MAT_PKG_HOME%\bin\MATWorkspaceEngine.cmd %TMP%\ne_workspace assign \
--users "user1,user2" voa2

These assignments will be in addition to any assignments made when you import.

In an upcoming release, we will make reconciliation available in workspaces, so multiply-assigned documents can be reconciled within the context of the workspaces.

Inspecting the state of the workspace

The workspace list operation allows you to list the contents of all the folders in the workspace, and the dump_database operation shows you the contents of the workspace database. You may find these operations useful for debugging.