Glossary

Glossary

Glossary of terminology used in wai-annotations.

Component - A single participating element in a pipeline. Can be a source (inserts items into the start of a pipeline), a sink (consumes items from the end of a pipeline), or a processor (an intermediary element which performs some operation on the items in the pipeline).

Conversion Pipeline - A series of stages comprising a complete conversion sequence, consisting of an input format, a series of intermediate processing stages, and a final output format.

Cross-Domain Converter (XDC) - An intermediate processor which converts a dataset from one domain to another. For example, a video-based domain could be converted to an image-based domain by treating each frame of the video as an individual image.

Domain - A specific type of data, being annotated in a specific manner. For example, datasets in the image object-detection domain consist of still images annotated with regions containing identified objects.

Format - An external representation of a domain. This is typically a way of storing instances of the domain on disk.

Inline Stream Processor (ISP) - An intermediate processor in the conversion chain, which performs some mutation of the items in a dataset. ISPs cannot change the domain of a dataset. For example, an ISP might remove images that are smaller than a certain size from the conversion stream (for image-based domains).

Instance - A specific example of data-item and its annotations in a given domain.

Macro - A command-line keyword which is used in place of a series of command-line options. Macros are stored in a JSON file, and specified to wai.annotations via the --macro-file command-line option.

Negative Example - An item in a dataset which has no annotations. These are typically used when learning to provide examples of what not to look for.

Plugin - An implementation of a stage which can be used by wai.annotations to perform some feature. Plugins can be specified by external modules via the wai.annotations.plugins entry-point in their setup.py script.

Plugin Specifier - A class which advertises the components that a particular plugin offers for use with wai-annotations.

Pipeline - A series of components which process items in their defined order, each passing its output to the next.

Specifier - A class used to advertise a stage/domain to wai.annotations from an external module.

Splitting - Because wai.annotations only supports linear pipelines, many formats support splitting of their outputs over a number of output directories.

Stage - A collection of components which produces, consumes or processes instances.