Getting Started

There are multiple solutions in order to get started within the WebLab platform. However one should note a few things first (see weblab features description for more information):

• WebLab is a platform developed through research projects and not meant to be use as it for an operational application ;
• WebLab is an integration platform dedicated to unstructured document processing and retrieval (and more...) ;
• WebLab is a server application and even if the demo is packaged to be easily deployed and installed on a single machine for test purpose, most applications based on WebLab are multi-servers application and there configuration might not be easy out of the box;

This being said, you will find hereafter the possible ways to get in touch with the WebLab. If you have any question, please have look at the Support page in order to select the best mean (user mailing list, developer mailing list, IRC channel or JIRA bug tracker).

Test the demo

The easiest way is to download the latest WebLab Bundle demo package available on the OW2 forge. It's a simple Zip file and once extracted you should be able to easily install and launch a simple demo application based on WebLab. The scope of the demonstration is really "reduced to the minimum" in order to be able to run on a single machine. So it can:

• get documents from a local folder ;
• normalise and extract text content from standard desktop text files ;
• automatically extract information about named entities in the text in English and French (using default ANNIE/Gate rules)  ;
• index the results in a SOLR server ;
• provide access and search capabilities to the processed documents through a text search engine and document visualisation tool.

On the hardware side, the demo is configured to run on an advanced computer (not a standard desktop configuration):

• minimal specifications: four CPU cores with 6Go of memory and 400Mo of disk space
• recommended specifications: eight CPU cores with 12Go of memory and 500Mo of disk space (an SSD hard disk is recommended)

Then on the capability side this demonstration include less than 10 documents but it has been tested on more than 10000. So you can try with your own documents. Find more information on the Bundle 2.0.0

Learn about the WebLab

If the demonstration is not enough for you, then you can look at the projects to have more information about the multiple projects that are (or were) using the WebLab. Some of them have on-line video demonstration. For the scientists, you can look on the publication section were some of the papers published in international conferences are listed.

Still hungry? Let's go in the core of the platform with the page dedicated to the WebLab Architecture and which introduce the core principles and guidelines that support the WebLab.

Work with WebLab

The developers interested in setting up a WebLab application and/or developing and testing their own WebLab components should have a look on the Developer Dashboard which links all resources relevant for happy WebLab coders.

The greedy ones can go directly to the WebLab forge to have access to the source code available on SVN or have a look at the Javadoc.