Getting started

At this point, you have installed the manager software on one machine and at least one instance of the worker software on another. This topic describes how to set up your first cluster and begin processing documents.

Creating a new cluster

A cluster is a set of nodes that share the same type of extraction processing and data destination. To process any documents with i2 TextChart Server, you must define at least one cluster.

  1. Open the manager user interface by navigating to http://<manager_host>:<admin_port>/manager in a web browser, replacing <manager_host> and <admin_port> with the values for your installation.

    If you're asked to log in to the administrator UI, the default user is admin and the default password is rosoka. You can change these credentials later.

  2. The left side of the user interface contains contains links to different features. Click Clusters to navigate to the Clusters page.

  3. Initially, no clusters are defined. Create one by clicking New Cluster.

  4. In the dialog that appears, enter a name and an optional short description for the new cluster. Click Add.

At this point, you have a new cluster with a default set of LxBase, GxBase, and properties. To configure the cluster further, click the drop-down menu next to its name and select Configure.

Adding workers to a cluster

For now, we will leave the cluster settings as they are, and add one or more nodes to it.

  1. Click Workers to navigate to the Workers page.

    The page is divided into two sections: known or registered workers appear at the top, while workers that are unknown but requesting access to the manager appear at the bottom. You should see a list of the workers that you started in the bottom section.

  2. For each of the unknown workers, select the drop-down menu and click Register Worker.

    As you register the worker nodes, they disappear from the bottom and move to the top of the page with a status of registered.

  3. In the Cluster column for each registered worker, click the drop-down and select the cluster that you just created. The worker then moves to the configured state.

    Depending on the speed of your network, this operation might take a few minutes, as the lexical and geographic assets are quite large.

  4. When all the nodes are in the configured state, click the drop-down menu next to the worker name and select Enable/Disable. Each worker moves to the starting state, and eventually to the ready state. At this point, the workers are ready to process documents.

Processing documents

To process some documents, you can use the manager's built-in web client to select a few files on your local file system.

  1. Navigate to http://<manager_host>:<client_port>, where <manager_host> is the hostname or IP address of the manager, and <client_port> is the client port number that you specified during installation.

  2. In the page that appears, select a cluster to use for processing from the Select a cluster drop-down menu.

  3. Click Drop files here to upload to open a file selection dialog, or simply drag and drop a file from your local file system to the drop location.

    The file is uploaded and processed, and the results appear on the right side of the display.