Multi Tier Annotation Search

In recent years, multiple solutions have come available providing search on huge amounts of plain text and metadata. Scalable searchability on annotated text however still appears to be problematic. Using Mtas, we not only take advantage of the strength from Lucene and Solr, but extend queries with CQL conditions on annotated text

[pos="LID"] [pos="ADJ"]? [lemma="amsterdam"]

<entity="location/> within (<s/> containing [lemma="utrecht"])

Also a Simple query parser can be used

koe paard

"de koe" paard

"de pos:ADJ koe"

Parsers for several document formats are provided, each with extended possibilities for configuration.

Advanced query features like statistics, termvectors and kwic are included.

Source code and releases are available on GitHub, see installation instructions on how to get started.


This project builds upon the latest commit from April 30, 2018 for meertensinstituut/mtas. See also the related broker project, another continuation of previous work.


Nederlab

One of the primary use cases for Mtas, the Nederlab project, currently1 provides access, both in terms of metadata and annotated text, to over 74 million items for search and analysis as specified below.

Total Mean Min Max
Solr index size 2,715 G 60.3 G 75 k 288 G
Solr documents 74,762,559 1,661,390 119 11,912,415

Collections are added and updated regularly by adding new cores, replacing cores and/or merging new cores with existing ones. Currently, the data is divided over 44 separate cores. For 41,437,881 of these documents, annotated text varying in size from 1 to over 3.5 million words is included:

Total Mean Min Max
Words 18,494,454,357 446 1 3,537,883
Annotations 95,921,919,849 2,314 4 23,589,831

Middelnederlands

Mtas is also used on Middelnederlands.nl, including geographical selections and new analysis options.2

example document

Keyword in context

example kwic

Group results

example group

Geographic conditions

example geographic

Correlation analysis

example correlation

Geographical analysis

example map1

example map1


1 situation June 2018

2 release April 2020