CAS Viewer Extension For Provenance Tracking of UIMA CAS Content

1. Proposal

To improve the ability to debug and maintain UIMA components, we propose to add the ability to log the updates to the CAS and the Index Repository as follows:

• track which Analysis Engines (AEs) created or modified the feature structures in a CA
• track the operations (add and delete) by each AE to index feature structures

 The collected information can be classified as follows:

• Call sequence to AEs

• For each AE, a list of newly created feature structures (FSs) and a list of changes to pre-existing FSs. We will use FS Journal as the terminology to refer to this information

• For each AE, a list of added, deleted, and modified FSs to/from index repository (if the same FS is deleted and added back to the index, we will classified as "modified"). We will use Index Journal as the terminology to refer to this information.

The development of this "Provenance Tracking of UIMA CAS Content" as described in the Wiki is composed of two parts:

• providing APIs in the UIMA framework to support access of journaling information

• visualizing the collected information
  In this documentation, we will focus on the GUI part of the visualization from the end-user's perspective.