How to use this documentation

MAT is organized around the notion of a task. A task defines

• the annotations you can add or edit, and how they look in the annotation tool
  
• the automated tagging engines you can apply, the order in which you can apply them, and the hand annotation steps you can interleave
  
• the way annotation similarity is determined, for scoring and comparison
  
• the ways you can manage your annotation workflows
  

and much more. Most of the tools you'll use in MAT require a task to be defined.

After the initial administrative sections, this documentation is divided into three major "guidance" sections, plus a reference section which captures the remaining detail. The three major sections are:

• For users: this section is intended for people as they annotate, score, or otherwise manipulate documents when either a task has already been defined for them, or a task is not required. This section begins with a number of tutorials which exemplify the major capabilities of MAT, followed by a section covering the major concepts in MAT, and then more detailed documentation about the MAT UI and command-line tools that someone in this role might use.
• For task maintainers: this section is intended for people as they construct or modify tasks, or create or maintain complex workspace workflows for those tasks. This section of the documentation presupposes some familiarity at least with the major concepts in MAT, and perhaps with additional details from the first section.
• For developers: this section contains what documentation is available for programmers either creating Python customizations of MAT tasks, or programming against the Python, Java or JavaScript MAT document APIs. This section of the documentation presupposes a strong familiarity with the major concepts in MAT. This section of the documentation is the least fleshed-out (and will most likely continue to be).

We've tried hard to make the documentation accessible, and to reduce the amount of material a user needs to digest to use MAT

If you acquired the Python pip module...

Be warned that only a subset of the documentation is applicable to the pip module. In particular, you may ignore:

• the tutorial (except for the purposes of information)
• the Web interface documentation
• the command-line tools
• the standalone viewer
• the Java and JavaScript APIs
• the test suite
• the default jCarafe engine
  

For more details about what is and isn't included in the pip module, see here.