Hi Wouter,
Thank you for your detailed reply. I'm afraid I have a few more questions for you:
1. If users are not relying on GATE to produce the standoff notation, what tools are they using?
2. If I send you a simple GATE format XML, could you give me an estimate of how difficult it would be to get working with MonetDB's standoff extension?
3. Given the implementation of standoff that you describe, can a user access the span of text demarcated by the start and end character positions? For example, could I check if a certain regular expression pattern appeared within the text span? Much of my analysis will involve comparing both the annotations and the text itself.
4. Finally, are there any front-ends available for MonetDB that would enable me to edit/update XML content in a way that hides levels of detail that I don't need to see at times? Or, that would allow me to save, reload, and execute queries quickly?
thank you again, -david