Eduction Architecture

You run Eduction by using an Eduction engine. This engine uses the Eduction grammars to process text and return the matched entities.

The following diagram shows the use of grammars in an Eduction engine.

The standard grammar files are a wide range of ECR files that Micro Focus provides in your Eduction installation (see Standard Grammar – Compiled). You can use these files as they are, or extend them by creating a grammar XML file that includes them. You can also create your own user grammar files from scratch.

You compile XML grammar files into ECR by using the edktool command-line tool. For more information see Compile and Test Grammars.

NOTE: Eduction can also use XML grammar files directly (that is, without compiling them to ECR files). However, in most cases Micro Focus recommends that you compile your grammars to improve performance.

How you use the Eduction engine depends on the way you call Eduction. For example, you can:

  • Use Eduction as part of an IDOL ingestion process.

    In this case, you use IDOL Connectors to retrieve documents from your repositories and send them to IDOL NiFi Ingest. IDOL NiFi Ingest performs any processing on the documents, including sending text to the Eduction engine. The Eduction engine sends back the entity matches, which IDOL NiFi can add to new fields in your IDOL documents. For more information, refer to the IDOL NiFi Ingest Getting Started Guide.

    The following diagram shows this process.

    TIP: This process is similar if you use Connector Framework Server (CFS) to ingest your documents.

  • Use Eduction Server to run Eduction.

    In this case, you send your text in ACI actions (from a front-end application or Web browser) to the Eduction Server, which runs the Eduction engine that processes the text and returns the matched entities. See Use Eduction Server.

  • Call Eduction directly by using the Eduction SDK.

    In this case, your custom application sends text directly to the Eduction engine, which then returns the matched entities. For more information, see Deploy Eduction SDK.

You can also run Eduction by using the edktool command-line tool. This method can be useful for testing your grammars or entities when you make modifications (see Compile and Test Grammars). However, Micro Focus recommends that you do not use edktool as part of a production system.

TIP: If you do not know which Eduction package is best for your use case, see Decide Which Eduction Product to Use.