The XCAS Annotation Viewer is a tool for viewing analysis results that have been saved to your disk as XCAS files. XCAS is the XML representation of the CAS. In the UIMA SDK, XCAS files can be generated by:

• Running the Document Analyzer (see Chapter 17, Document Analyzer User's Guide), which saves XCAS files to the specified output directory.
• Running a Collection Processing Engine that includes the XCAS Writer CAS Consumer (docs/examples/descriptors/cas_consumer/XCasWriterCasConsumer.xml).
• Explicitly creating XCAS files from your own application using the com.ibm.uima.cas.impl.XCasSerializer class. The best way to learn how to do this is to look at the example code for the XCAS Writer CAS Consumer, located in docs/examples/src/com/ibm/uima/examples/cpe/XCasWriterCasConsumer.java.

• The XCAS Annotation Viewer only shows CAS views where the Sofa data type is a String.

You can run the XCAS Annotation Viewer by executing the xcasAnnotationViewer shell script located in the bin directory of the UIMA SDK. This will open the following window:

Select an input directory (which must contain XCAS files), and the descriptor for the TAE that produced the Analysis (which is needed to get the type system for the analysis). Then press the "View" button.

This will bring up a dialog where you can select a viewing format and double-click on a document to view it. This dialog is the same as the one that is described in Chapter 17.3, Viewing the Analysis Results.