Configuring TextAE

A configuration of TextAE can be written inside an annotation JSON file, or in a separate JSON file. The latter is more convenient if you want to share a configuration across multiple annotation JSON files.

In case you have prepared a configuration in a separate JSON file, you can put it in any location which is accessible through the net (a github repository would be a good idea, because you can manage revision history of your configuration).

An example of TextAE configuration can be found at: http://textae.pubannotation.org/examples/config-example.json

Then, when you open an instance of TextAE, the configuration can be specified using the parameter, configure, e.g.,

http://textae.pubannotation.org/editor.html?config=http://textae.pubannotation.org/examples/config-example.json...

The elements of a TextAE configuration is described below:

Entity types

You can predefine entity types to be assigned to spans through denotation-type of annotations. In following example, two entity types, Protein and Regulation, are defined with their color specification to be #0000FF (blue) and #FF0000 (red):

"entity types": [
  {
    "id": "Protein",
    "color": "#0000FF",
    "default": true
  },
  {
    "id": "Regulation",
    "color": "#FF0000",
  }
]

Optionally, you can specify a dominant type to be a default type (Protein in above example). Then, the type will be preselected when you create a denotation-type annotation.

Sometimes, you may want to assign a URI as the identifier of an entity type, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NF-κB (The wikipedia page of NF-κB).

"entity types": [
  {
    "id": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NF-κB",
    "color": "#0000FF",
  }
]

In such a case, as a URI is usually too long to be comfortably displayed, TextAE shows only the last element of the URI, e.g., NF-κB, in the visualization, rather than showing the whole long URI.

Sometimes, the last element of a URI is not very human-readable. For example, Below is the URI of the UniProt entry for Thy-1 membrane glycoprotein: https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P04216

In such a case, you can specify the label to be displayed for the entity type.

"entity types": [
  {
    "id": "https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P04216",
    "color": "#FF0000",
    "label": "Thy-1"
  }
]

Then, TextAE will show the label in the editor screen instead of the URI.

Relation types

You can predefine relation types to be used for relation-type of annotations. In following example, two relation types, “themeOf” and “causeOf”, are defined with their color specification to be #0000FF (blue) and #FF0000 (red):

"relation types": [
  {
    "id": "themeOf",
    "color": "#0000FF",
    "default": true
  },
  {
    "id": "causeOf",
    "color": "#FF0000"
  }
]

Delimiter characters

TextAE features the function, Boundary Detection (). When the feature is on, word boundaries are automatically detected to help selecting spans to be annotated.

The set of Delimiter characters defines the characters to be regarded as word boundaries. Following is the default set of delimiter characters:

"delimiter characters": [
  " ", ".", "!", "?", ",", ":", ";", "-", "/", "&",
  "(", ")", "{", "}", "[", "]",
  "\\", "\"", "'", "\n", "–"
]

If necessary, you can re-defined it in your configuration file.

Non-edge characters

The set of non-edge characters defines the characters which cannot appear at the edge of any span. Following is the default set of non-edge characters:

"non-edge characters": [
  " ",
  "\n"
],