Importing and Configuring Corpora

Before a corpus can be used in ANNIS, it has to be imported once. This section describes how you can create corpora for ANNIS from existing corpora in different formats, how you import it and various corpus-related configuration options.

ANNIS consists of a front-end web-application and a back-end service. In the Kickstarter version, both components are combined into one application. The behavior of these components can be customized changing their configuration.

Back-end service

There is a configuration folder conf/ in the installation directory with the main configuration file annis-service.properties. In addition, there is the shiro.info file to change the location of the user configuration. You should not need to change any of the other files in this directory.

Front-end web-application

The ANNIS front-end will search in different folders for it's configuration.

FolderDescription
<Installation>/WEB-INF/conf/Default configuration inside the deployed web application folder. Should not be changed.
$ANNIS_CFG or /etc/annis/The global configuration folder defined by the environment variable ANNIS_CFG or a default path if not set.
~/.annis/User specific configuration inside the .annis sub-folder inside the home folder of the user who is running the frontend.

Configuration files can be either in the Java Properties or JSON format. Configuration files from the user directory can overwrite the global configuration and the global configuration overwrites the default configuration.