Felxible term clouds - user-interaction

I have to implement dynamic term clouds. I need to let the users remove terms from clouds or assign them to from one cloud to another one. They should be also capable of merging or splitting clouds. Hence, the clouds should be completely dynamic in a way that the user has all kinds of freedom to manipulate them.
Is there any library in Java that could help me out? Is there any implementation already available for this purpose?

I found an API that is free while in beta.
http://tagul.com/
Users can exclude certain words from the clouds, you can create custom shapes, and duplicate clouds.
The clouds it generates have rollover effects and can be exported as graphics with transparent backgrounds.

Related

How to evaluate SciSpaCy's entity linking

I'm using SciSpaCy's Entity Linker with a custom knowledge base. As I'm updating some components of my application (e.g. the underlying language model, sentence tokenization pipeline, the knowledge base itself, etc), I'm noticing that (1) the number of entities that the application picks up changes and (2) the linked concepts themselves change (not the detected entities but the concepts that are linked to these entities). With this in mind, I'd like to be able to evaluate my entity-linking application.
Unfortunately, I cannot seem to find any resources for that. I was hoping to find either an evaluation library of some sort (assuming we are not just interested in a confusion matrix) or a "gold standard" dataset with entities in various forms (e.g. abbreviated, inflected, etc) and the expected linked concept.
I'm afraid I'm a novice in this field which is why I'm reaching out here, hoping that anyone might be able to point me to a set of useful resources or share some tips with me.
Many thanks in advance.

Uml diagram to view current structure/connections between applications of information system

I am complete beginner in uml and need to make diagrams to show use and structure of current information system in organization. They use one system for manufacturing and one for accounting, warehousing and HR. First I want to do use cases with description. First question is should i do it by module (each area of business they cover)?
Then i need a diagram to view connections between the systems. Is it okay to use component diagram or which diagram is more appropriate? If company uses Office 365 does it show in diagram? Also if system supports EDI should i also include it?
Thanks for help.
As always: It depends.
Use cases are about added value. If you are going to document a complex system it's a good idea to group things. For a company a grouping by organizations would be reasonable. Though there are often horizontal (single focus) and vertical (needed in multiple area) departments. If the focus is to "re-invent" you should probably decouple your view. Anyhow, finding real use cases is a difficult task. So during synthesizing them you will likely find out how to group them logically.
Starting with components is also a good idea. You can use component instances showing concrete uses (with locations shown via packages). These concrete components can be abstracted to general components so you known which different basic components are used (package them centrally). Interfaces between components can be shown by assembly connectors (those with socket/lollipop). Later you can detail important components using ports and interfaces. Other components can be left peripherally without more details. Whether EDI/Office are "important" depends. Include them generally and find out in discussions during analysis whether details are needed.

Tool for protocol or interface description

We have to develop a protocol as a interface description between different systems in different companies. The implementations will be made in different languages (not known) by the developers in each company.
However, we want to develop the protocol on a textual description base together. I will have the base copy of the current version and want to send it out to all for comments.
What is a good tool to do so?
At the moment we are using MS Word what leads to several problems:
We need a lot of time for text formatting things.
Its not possible to reference to a datatype in the methods description.
The wording differs from chapter to chapter (different authors) and is hard to align.
Perfect would be:
A tool with a glossary and auto-completion.
References to other items (methods, data types, ...) with active links.
Automatic generation of a human-readable (PDF-) document.
Do you know such a tool?
PS: I did not get Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect doing the job. Maybe also hints for this one?
This is a very big question, since there are many possible aspects you may (should) wish to document in a protocol specification. The two most important ones would be data structures and message sequences, then there's error management, authentication, timing, etc etc.
UML can certainly be used to describe these things, and Enterprise Architect is eminently able to generate versatile documentation from a model - it will definitely help with your reference issues. But first you will have to determine quite strictly how each aspect of the protocol is to be modelled, and from that you will need to construct the necessary EA configuration / adaptation.
In order to get good quality documents out of EA, I recommend generating the documents from an Add-In using the Object Model's DocumentGenerator class as this gives you more flexibility than the traditional RTF generator - for one thing, you can access Word's API in addition to EA's and thus do far more with the document than is possible using EA's API alone.
Without knowing the size or complexity of your protocol, I'd say this would require at the very least a few weeks' work for someone who is experienced in writing EA adaptations. But if the scope of your project is such that there are several companies involved, it is likely to be worth the investment.

Mass-Replacing Objects using Unity's label tags?

Im currently working on an exercise, for which I want to create a technical design documentation.
Therefore, I need to evaluate possible solutions to a bunch of problems coming with my fictional project.
Here's a quick glance at the exercise:
The game's art & core game design are split up very harshly - basically, the core system, game mechanics and design are created to be very abstract, in order to allow them to work with a very wide variety of art settings. Also, one of the restrictions is to re-use as many assets, levels & designs as possible.
Now to my question:
I want the level designers to create levels using "template" objects (object which have all the technical features that are required, ie slots for attachments, correct scale, textures etc) and later replace these objects with set of assets I receive from my outsourcer.
Since I dont want to manually replace all objects whenever I get a new set of assets, this is what I wanted to do:
Each template object gets a descriptive label, and each asset delivered by the outsourcer needs to have the exact same label name as its corresponding template-counterpart stored in it as well (for example as a custom attribute, a channel, or simply in its name).
I now want to replace all templates with the related asset using a script.
This would be done for each set of assets. I would also keep several deployments of my engine, one per set, but initially, they'd all start out with the templates that need to be replaced (since there will need to be some modifications for each setting, both visually and from a game design perspective, keeping all assets in one trunk/project didn't make any sense to me).
To make this easier i'd use a "database" of some sorts (probably a simple dictionary which the engine script could query and which would be filled out beforehand by another script upon delivery of new assets?).
My question is: is this possible? If yes, how difficult would this be from a programmers perspective? I have only limited knowledge in this field, so I'd love to hear what you lads & ladies think about this.
Also (very important) - do you know of a better way to achieve this "replacability" of assets? Or simply have an easier way to achieve what I want to do? I appreciate any feedback! Thank you!
quick edit: This would not only be applied to 3d Objects; textures would also need to be replaced, obviously
I think you are looking for Prefabs.
Basically prefabs implements a sort of prototype pattern.
Instead of putting into scene's hierarchy directly a GameObject you can make it a prefab and put into the scene a GameObject that is an instance of that prefab.
When a GameObject into the scene is linked to a prefab, and the prefab will be modified, the linked object will be modified too.
If you have several instances of the same prefab, all istances will be updated as well.
The only strong limitation to this feature is that, since now, nested prefabs aren't supported.
I want the level designers to create levels using "template" objects
(object which have all the technical features that are required, ie
slots for attachments, correct scale, textures etc) and later replace
these objects with set of assets I receive from my outsourcer.
This is the tipical use case. You have a placeholder into the scene (es. a Cube) that will be subistitued by a model when the artists will provide it.
If you instantiate 100 cubes into the scene, when you need to substitute them, you would do it manually for all objects.
If instead you have created a prefab (lets call it ModelPrefab) and the cubes into the scene are instances of that prefab, when you'll have the new 3d model you can simply update the prefab and all linked instances will be updated too.
My question is: is this possible? If yes, how difficult would this be
from a programmers perspective?
If you can work without nested prefabs you have to do nothing, it's already implemented. If you need to implement nested prefabs, it might not be so straightforward.
quick edit: This would not only be applied to 3d Objects; textures
would also need to be replaced, obviously
I made the example above using the models, but you can make a prefab from each GameObject that is actually a collection of Components (have a look at Component Based Object Management if you are interested).
EDIT
Yes, it is possible to update prefabs throught script the required functions are in the UnityEditor namespace, so they mast be used through an editor extension.
You can found all you need in PrefabUtility class.

Organizing diagrams in Enterprise Architect

Is it possible to somehow organize my diagrams in Enterprise Architect? We're starting having too many of them, with each diagram containing many elements. Is creating a separate folder for each diagram the only solution to make the model easier to see through, or is there a more elegant layout for that?
In the first place, Model Views will help you to create distinct viewpoints representing your entities from different perspectives.
If you stick to the architecture principles of loose coupling and modularity, you should be able to split up very big diagrams into smaller ones. After all, their role is to give you an idea of how things are coupled and work together, but also to abstract from things that are not really relevant in the given context of the diagram. Diagrams are not meant to just visualize all elements in one big picture.
You can create package structures that are pretty complex and then use the model search. You can also put hyperlink elements for easier navigation between diagrams.
If you have to split up elements into different diagrams (which then go into different packages) EA will preserve their relationships and you can review them at any time using the traceability view.
I would also have a look at the EA options for composite diagrams. This should help you re-organise a Single System into a number of Composite Sub-Systems.
To start modeling an application architecture, you can use a perspective based approach or a view modeling perspectives approach to describe your system. For example use the 4+1 view based approach to collect your Logical, Development, NonFunctional and Requirements perspective. Organize it according the mentioned dimmensions or decompose each dimmension by the application modules and have a conceptual view to have a global view of your system.
To start with a model of an enteprise architecture use for example the togaf dimensions or zachman framework layers and dimmensions
You can use several packages to categorize your content.
I use to make a package diagram on top level which dynamically updates its contents depending on underlying packages (simply drag & drop the packages in the package diagram)
and the content (e.g. for activity diagrams) like entry or final can be saved in a common package.
Unfortunately there is no possibility yet (version 10 build 1004) to customize the packages e.g. with colors. So that a common packages could have a distinct color.
What I do to make Project Browser more organized is to create one package named "Diagram's elements" and drag all the diagram element there.
There's some good advice in this blog on the Sparx Systems (the EA publisher) website.

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