Pipeline

classDiagram
    class AbstractPipeline
    class Pipeline
    class PipelineStep

    Pipeline--> "*" AbstractPipeline
    Pipeline..|>AbstractPipeline
    PipelineStep..|>AbstractPipeline

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For the pipeline definition, we use a composite to allow us to have a multi-level pipeline. As such, a pipeline consists of an arbitrary number of either PipelineSteps or further Pipelines.

In our approach, we use three levels for our pipeline: On the first level, the overall pipeline defines multiple stages, e.g., text preprocessing or element connection. Each stage is another pipeline that then defines agents that have the purpose of initiating the processing and of collecting the information of the various heuristics. Agents then use Informants as concrete PipelineSteps to execute the processing and heuristics.

A pipeline step (i.e., an Informant) stores results within a repository that can be universally accessed by all pipeline steps, similarly to a blackboard in the blackboard pattern. This way, each pipeline step and, thus, each heuristic can access the results of previous steps and provide its results for others.