OpenSextantToolbox

A GATE based geotagger

Based on the GATE open source text processing framework (http://gate.ac.uk), the OpenSextant Toolbox includes a set of GATE processing resources (plugins) which are assembled together to form a document processing pipeline which extracts geospatial information: geographic coordinates and named places. The OpenSextant Toolbox builds upon other elements of the OpenSextant project such as OpenSextant Gazetteer and SolrTextTagger projects.

Get the latest release

Get the release from https://github.com/OpenSextant/OpenSextantToolbox/releases/latest
Unzip and see /scripts/README_server.txt

Building OpenSextant (must use Java 8)

• Check it out

  Get it from Github

• Config

  copy build.local.properties to build.properties and set proxy host and port if behind a firewall

• To build a runnable release

  ant

  The release package will appear in the base directory of the OpenSextantToolbox project as opensextant-toolbox-VERSION.zip

• To build a release and then run all the examples

  ant test

• To build a release and then deploy to Cloud Foundry

  Because Cloud Foundry has an application size limit of 1G it is not advised to push a release that contains the full gazetteer. Instead, deploy Solr with the gazeteer data and configure OpenSextantToolbox to use the remote instance of Solr.

  Stand up Solr with gazetteer and vocabulary cores

  Install Solr 5.5.x. For the sake of these instructions, we use SOLR_BASE to refer to the root of your Solr installation.

  Build the jars and load the gazetteer (which takes a while)

  ant buildWithGaz

  Copy /build/solr to somewhere reachable by Solr. This /solr directory created by OpenSextantToolbox will be used for SOLR_HOME. The Solr home directory (not to be confused with the Solr installation directory) is where Solr manages core directories with index files.

  Make a /lib directory in SOLR_HOME

  Copy /lib/Standalone/lucene-*.jar to SOLR_HOME/lib/

  Copy /lib/Standalone/solr-text-tagger.jar to SOLR_HOME/lib/

  Copy /lib/Standalone/jts.jar to SOLR_INSTALL/server/lib (for some reason the jts jar needs to be in the lib directory for solr install and not in the lib directory for the cores)

  Start solr

  SOLR_HOME=[path to /solr created by OpenSextantToolbox] bin/solr start

  Build OpenSextantToolbox without the gazetteer

  ant release-pcf

  Set SOLR_BASE_URL environment variable in manifest.yml then push to Cloud Foundry

  cf push

NOTE: Since loading the gazetteer data into solr can take a while, for testing/impatience you can use a small version of gazetteer which is much faster to load than the full gazetteer. Change the value of "csv.gaz" in OpenSextantToolbox's build.xml to point to either the full or small gazetteer. This small gazetteer contains countries, national capaitals, province/states and some big cities. Although it represents less than 1% of the full gazetteer, it actually produces decent results on generic news-like documents.

Using OpenSextant

The OpenSextant capabilities can be used in three ways:

1. Integrated into your own Java code
   See the examples in org.opensextant.examples package in the OpenSextantToolbox project. There are examples of how to setup and send documents to the geotagger and general purpose entity extractor pipelines. In addition there are examples for some of the major internal components that these processing pipelines use, such as:

   • how to tag documents using only the gazetter
   • how to lookup places names in the gazetteer
   • how to tag documents with the regular expression matcher component.

2. A REST service
   The release includes a simple REST servive that provides access to the major capabilities. To start the REST services, run scripts/start.bat or start.sh This will start the services, using the configuration defined in etc/service-config.properties. See scripts/README_server.txt for more config details as well as examples on how to call these REST services. There are also some instructions to install the services as Linux service.

3. Used within the GATE Developer design and test tool
   The GATE framework (on which much of OpenSextant is built) provides a design and test tool called GATE Developer. This is useful to debug a processing pipeline, to test the results of an extraction against a standard data set or just to see the innards of an extraction process. To use GATE Developer, first download and install the full GATE distro (http://gate.ac.uk/download) (The GATE used in OpenSextant build is the runtime part of GATE and doesn't include GATE Developer and a large number of plugins for all kinds of language processing). Install this somewhere handy. In the OpenSextantToolbox project, make sure you set the value of "gate.home" in the build.properties file to where you just installed GATE. Then do "ant toolbox-deploy" which will copy the OpenSextant plugin into the GATE distribution. Edit the GATE Developer startup config ("gate.l4j.ini" in the top level of the GATE distro you just installed) to tell GATE about the extra jars files it needs for OpenSextant and the location of the solr gazeteer contained in the release, by adding the following lines:
   -Dgate.class.path="<WHERE.YOU.INSTALLED.GATE\plugins\OpenSextantToolbox\lib_extra\*"
-Dsolr.home="<WHERE.YOU.UNZIPPED.THE.RELEASE>\solr"

   Having done all of the above, you can open one of the OpenSextant pipelines (called GAPP (GATE Application) files in GATE nomenclature) in GATE Developer via File->"Restore application from File and selecting one of the OpenSextant GAPP files located in the LanguageResources/GAPPs directory. That will load up the GAPP file, exposing all of the configuration and details of that pipeline. Read the GATE documentation to see what you can do from there (run, test modify ...)