Architecture

ANNIS is a web-based search and visualization architecture for multi-layer corpora. ANNIS consists of two major components: a backend service and a web front-end.

Backend Service

The service is part of the graphANNIS project and provides a REST API to query and manage corpora. GraphANNIS directly implements all needed functionality without the need of an external database. See the graphANNIS documentation for more information about the REST service.

Web Front-end

The ANNIS front-end is a web application implemented in Java and the Vaadin framework and runs in a normal browser (we recommend Mozilla Firefox). The server running the web-application communicates with the backend service via a REST interface. Per default, the web front-end includes a released version of the backend service and starts an instance of it. The front-end uses Spring Boot internally and bundles it own server, so you don't need a Tomcat or Jetty installation to run it.