Write v1.3 Crunchy Frog Announcement

[ghost]

Once v1.3 is ready to ship we need to announce it, brat has gone well beyond our control and pops up everywhere. So, a major announcement is really the only way to reach out to the community. Here are some points that should be added compared to our old v1.1 announcement:

• Acknowledge the now large userbase
• Thank you for all the patience with short-comings and with the fact that we are developing brat on the side, while devoted to keeping it available, developed and useful we are not working full-time
• Thank you for all the bug reports and code flowing back into brat
• Link to CONTRIBUTE.md and invite contributions
• Interested in who you are and how you are using brat, did it not work, is it working, etc. get in touch if you want to
• Announce the dev and user mailing lists
• Upgrading instructions
• Request blurbs, link back to the blurber if they want to
• Link to relevant Monty Python sketch
• Mention the number of unique visits to the web page and thank as well?

New features:

• Discontinuous spans
• Visualisation a'la CoreNLP (thanks to the Stanford group for this)
• TBD

Mailing lists:

• BioNLP
• Corpora

[ghost]

@spyysalo and @amadanmath, feel free to chime in here.

[spyysalo]

New features:

• Normalization and improved ontology integration
• Support for embedding brat in web pages (restating the CoreNLP bit -- is this documented?)
• Improved support for OSX
• Various optimizations and bug fixes

Mailing lists

• OBO-discuss
• Eslnet
• AMIA?

[amadanmath]

New features:

• Basic diff support for comparing two annotated collections

(I haven't worked on much else lately)

[ghost]

Luke pointed out that announcing on Linguist List may be a good idea. I have to check their requirements etc. but it is a good idea. An example of another announcement: http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-4295.html

[ghost]

We should also send the announcement to our own mailing list.

[spyysalo]

@ninjin : you mean the one with nobody on it? :-P

[ghost]

@spyysalo: Well, someone needs to send a first message. And we do have at least two non-developers on it.

[reckart]

Where is that mailing list? I was searching for a mailing list, but did not find one, so I subscribed to the GitHub project.

Are you going to provide a list of changes in the announcement? I need some good reasons why we should upgrade our brat frontend (js) code to 1.3 (we use our own backend).

It would be excellent if you could provide us with an overview of the changes to the JSON wire protocol between 1.2 and 1.3, that should make it easier for us to upgrade our backend.

[ghost]

@reckart: The mailing list is new and will be described in the announcement.

Regarding the differences for the protocol, from what I know the only major changes are for discontinuous annotations and that the version of the protocol is now to be sent with each request. We need to have a formal specification of the protocol at some point, but I sincerely doubt that I will have the time to do so in the near future. As for reasons to update, we will not be actively patching or developing v1.2 after the v1.3 release. So any bug-fixes or features would need to be back-ported by a third party for those staying with v1.2.

[ghost]

Version tagged, proceeding.