Basic concepts

AVAA Documents

An AVAA document, or simply a document in AVAA's context, is an XML file which contains both a corpus definition, and a procedure to operate on the specified corpus.

AVAA documents are usually converted into HTML, PDF or ZIP files, but their procedures can also export custom data during conversion, such as CSV or JSON files.

AVAA Corpus

A corpus is a list of files (annotations or media) that a document will work with.

A document specifies its corpus, and can itself be used as a corpus in other documents. This shared-corpus feature allows maintaining a corpus in only one document, and reusing this corpus in multiple other documents: when the corpus document is modified, all the other documents referencing it will inherit the corpus changes.

Therefore, a huge corpus can also be split up into smaller parts, and agglomerated via a "master corpus" document.