Data and Knowledge Processing (DKPro) - A middleware for natural language processing applications

DKPro（数据和知识处理）是计算语言学/自然语言处理领域的研究软件，拥有全球用户群。它弥合了开发研究原型的工具提供商与希望使用这些原型的研究人员以及寻求将NLP技术集成到其应用程序中的开发人员之间的差距。因此，DKPro在社区中扮演着重要的角色，作为研究软件的聚合器和集成器，不能被轻易取代，类似于Linux发行版在操作系统领域中扮演的角色。尽管近10年来一直在不断发展，但DKPro的发展主要依赖于少数人。目前正在朝着明确界定的社区进程和社区治理方向取得进展，以最终提供一个由社区驱动的可持续性模式，但进展非常缓慢。因此，本提案旨在提供资源，以加速和推动这一进程，并在三年期间产生足够的势头，使之在其后自我维持。我们提出了一套针对技术和管理问题的工作包，目标是建立一个大型用户和开发人员社区，以便在资助期后继续开发和维护。目前可用资源无法解决的一个主要技术差距是缺乏与大型基础设施项目（如KNIME或RapidMiner）以及面向用户的分析环境（如KNIME或RapidMiner）的接口。在行政方面，主要目标是建立一个具有明确社区治理概念的伞式组织，通过讲习班和研讨会推动进一步发展并参与社区。我们认为，DKPro是这一呼吁下的一个很好的资助候选人。由于其规模虽小但活跃的开发者社区已经确定并讨论了可持续发展的问题，并准备为拟议的工作包。作为DKPro软件的作者，我们不仅在技术层面上贡献了丰富的经验，而且在组织层面或研究和开源社区层面上也贡献了丰富的经验，我们多年来一直积极参与并做出贡献。DKPro已经拥有一套高度专业的工作流程，用于归档，版本控制，问题跟踪和文档以及适合学术界和工业界的许可模式。因此，DKPro是一个很好的社区驱动的转型过程的例子，我们计划将其记录为以后类似案例的参考示例。

DKPro (Data and Knowledge Processing) is a research software in the field of computational linguistics / natural language processing with a world-wide user base. It bridges the gap between tool providers that develop research prototypes on one side and on the other side researchers who want to use those prototypes as well as developers that seek to integrate NLP technology into their applications. Thus, DKPro plays an important role in the community as aggregator and integrator of research software that cannot be easily replaced, similar to the role that Linux distributions play in the realm of operating systems. Despite being continuously developed since almost 10 years now, the development of DKPro rests mainly on a few individuals. Progress towards a well-defined community process and community governance to eventually provide a community-driven sustainability model is present but very slow. Therefore, this proposal is designed to provide the resources to accelerate and drive this process and generate sufficient momentum over the course of three years that runs self-sustained afterwards. We propose a set of work packages that target both technical and administrative issues with the goal to establish a large user and developer community that will enable a continued development and maintenance after the funding period. One major technical gap, that cannot be addressed with the currently available resources, is the lack of interfaces to big infrastructure projects like CLARIN-D and to user-facing analytics environments like KNIME or RapidMiner. On the administrative side, a main goal is to establish an umbrella organization with a clear community governance concept that will drive the further development and engage the community through workshops and seminars.We believe that DKPro is an excellent candidate for funding under this call, as its small but active developer community has already identified and discussed the problems of sustainable development and are ready to contribute to the proposed work packages. We contribute considerable experience not only at the technical level as authors of the DKPro software, but also on the organizational level or on the level of research and open-source communities, where we have been actively participating and contributing over many years.DKPro already has a highly professional set of workflows for archiving, versioning, issue tracking and documentation as well as a licensing model that is suitable for academia and industry. DKPro is thus a good example for a community-driven transformation process, which we plan to document as a reference example for later similar cases.