A UIMA wrapper for the NCBO annotator.

SUMMARY: The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework and web services are emerging as useful tools for integrating biomedical text mining tools. This note describes our work, which wraps the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) Annotator-an ontology-based annotation service-to make it available as a component in UIMA workflows. AVAILABILITY: This wrapper is freely available on the web at http://bionlp-uima.sourceforge.net/ as part of the UIMA tools distribution from the Center for Computational Pharmacology (CCP) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. It has been implemented in Java for support on Mac OS X, Linux and MS Windows.

Integration and ease of installation are increasingly important concerns as the number of biomedical text mining tools grows in size and complexity. Many tools are deployed as web services to avoid complex installation. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO)'s Annotator (Jonquet, 2009) is one such tool. It integrates many biomedical ontologies into a concept annotation service available on the web. Instead of installing the tool locally, users outside of the NCBO can simply embed a web service client in their applications.

However, challenges for a bioinformatician extend beyond using a single service. Pipelines of tools are often assembled to accomplish a greater goal like identifying and annotating protein–protein interaction events. These tools work with different data formats for input and output, making the creation of a processing pipeline cumbersome. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) (Ferruci, 2006) is a framework for integrating such tools into a common data representation and interface. It provides a mechanism for running the tools in unison and extensions for scaling to larger processing loads. UIMA is commonly used in the biomedical natural language processing (NLP) community, and recognition of ontology concepts is an important component of many text mining applications. Hence, adaptation of the NCBO Annotator to UIMA will likely result in broad adoption of the Annotator in biomedical text mining research.

Once a tool has been adapted to UIMA, it can be used in many different assemblies or pipelines with other tools also adapted to UIMA. The Center for Computational Pharmacology (CCP) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has a collection of such adaptations or wrappers (Baumgartner, 2008), and has successfully used UIMA in the development of systems for participating in the BioCreative and BioNLP shared tasks. The CCP has now also adapted the NCBO Annotator to UIMA, making it available to UIMA projects.

The NCBO Annotator ‘automatically processes a piece of raw text to annotate (or tag) it with relevant ontology concepts and return the annotations’ (Jonquet, 2009). The Annotator accesses over 200 biomedical ontologies from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/) and the NCBO BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org/). The biomedical ontologies used by the Annotator can be thought of as enriched term lists that include relationships and synonyms. One of the ontologies available is the Gene Ontology (GO), (http://www.geneontology.org/) which can be used to find references to cell components, biological processes and molecular functions. The Annotator identifies ontology terms in submitted text and returns formally described annotations in the form of a Uniform Resource Identifier. For example, if mitochondrion appeared in the submitted text, the Annotator would return the start and end character indexes of the word, the GO ontology id, 39917, and an id for the concept within GO, GO:0005739. Such direct matches are found using the MGREP tool (Xuan, 2007). The Annotator enables the use of the hierarchical structure of the ontologies as well to provide more functionality: given a particular parameter setting, it can climb the ontology's is-a hierarchy and return more general concepts that relate to a particular term. For instance, it could return the ancestors of mitochondrion, i.e. intracellular membrane-enclosed organelle, intracellular organelle, organelle and cell component. Such matches are called is-a matches. They are considered indirect matches because MGREP does not match mitochondrion with them, rather they are found through relationships in the ontology. The UMLS and BioPortal also allow the Annotator to search between ontologies using mappings to produce a broader range of results including those from different forms of the term such as plurals (mitochondria would match mitochondrion for example).

The UIMA wrapper and the Annotator are actively being used in ongoing research that performs concept matching in text. The ultimate utility of this wrapper is to use the Annotator in more elaborate pipelines where the generated semantic annotations are used as input to downstream processing, for instance to help identify complex relationships between biological entities. For example, the CCP's work in BioNLP'09 (Cohen, 2009) used similar methods to create annotations that were then referenced in OpenDMAP (Hunter, 2008) patterns for identifying protein interactions.

To make the functionality of the Annotator easily available to other projects, it is deployed as a web service. A web service is a software component that makes functionality available over the web in order to be used by computer programs. In this case, the Annotator is accessible to both humans and computers, respectively through the BioPortal user interface and the BioPortal web service application programming interface. The ubiquity of the web and the simple protocols involved make it easy to access. All that is required is an HTTP library and an XML parser. Other output formats are available that are even easier to parse, though do not include as much detail.

The Annotator allows for control of term matching by exposing parameters available in the web service. For example, climbing the inheritance hierarchy can be limited with the levelMax parameter. A full description of parameters is available online (http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/Annotator_Web_service). All options described there are supported by the UIMA wrapper with the exception of outputFormat which is set to XML so that the results can be parsed internally to the wrapper itself.

Integrating the Annotator with UIMA requires a type system specification that defines the Java classes used to store annotations. This wrapper uses the CCP's type system, making it compatible with any of the other wrappers available in the CCP's collection, BioNLP-UIMA (Baumgartner, 2008), freely available online (http://bionlp-uima.sourceforge.net).

Using this wrapper in combination with other UIMA tools will involve some adaptation between type systems. Since no standard type system has emerged (Hahn, 2008), different UIMA adaptations are likely to use different type systems. The Julie Lab's JCORE (Hahn, 2008) and the Tsujii lab's U-Compare system (Kano, 2009), for example, use different type systems. Each has used different methods for adapting between type systems that apply here as well. JCORE makes use of a pair of type system adapters that convert from the local type system to the foreign one and back. Such a converter can be re-used whenever another tool from the same foreign type system is used. U-Compare makes use of both a shared type system where comparable annotations share a base class (Kano, 2008), and adapter pairs. Included with U-Compare is a pair of adapters for using CCP wrappers. The topic of type system design is explored more fully in Verspoor (2009).

Annotations are retrieved from the web service by the wrapper using the HttpComponents (http://hc.apache.org/) from Apache. They are unmarshalled from the returned XML by JAXB (https://jaxb.dev.java.net/). Then they are represented in the primary UIMA data structure, the Common Analysis Structure or CAS, using the structures available in the CCP type system (Verspoor, 2009). A CCPTextAnnotation delineates the span of the matched concept and holds references to other objects describing the annotation such as a CCPAnnotator that shows it came from the NCBO Annotator. A CCPClassMention object, named after the ontology and the term id, GO:000557, for example, contains references to CCPSlotMention objects that contain the attribute values. The attributes are ontology, concept and type. The type attribute tells what kind of a match the Annotator used to find the concept. Possible values are DIRECT, MAPPING and IS-A. DIRECT is for direct matches from the text to an ontology term found with MGREP. MAPPING is a match found in a second ontology based on a correspondence to a term in an initial ontology. More general concepts found through an ontology's hierarchy are marked with a type of IS-A. IS-A matches have a fourth attribute that tells how far up the hierarchy the term is, named LEVEL.

The wrapper limits the size of the requests it makes on the web service by using sentence annotations created by an analysis engine upstream in the processing pipeline (we currently use the LingPipe toolkit for sentence analysis), and sending one sentence at a time. This keeps requests below the 300 word limit. The NCBO reports that with 10 simulated users, requests of 280 words take <5 s. Our tests have been limited to five concurrent requests to leave some bandwidth for others. On the rare occasions the Annotator is unavailable, the wrapper waits for a short timeout and throws an exception that stops the pipeline.

The wrapper is available as part of the CCP's BioNLP-UIMA distribution. It requires Java 1.6 and includes build scripts that run on Macintosh and Linux variants. Windows support is forthcoming. Scripts download required third party jars and run the build. A sample pipeline is included ready to run after installation. Users outside our lab have installed the software quickly and easily. Further pipelines can be built using a UIMA-supplied GUI.

The NCBO Annotator provides annotations from a wealth of ontologies. Packaged as a web service, it is readily available to NLP researchers. With a UIMA adaptation provided by the CCP, it is now also available to the world of UIMA tools and pipelines.