Implement "run ID" property for views to distinguish app executions #269
Description
New Feature Summary
Several weeks ago, at an in-person meeting, we identified the necessity to impose a "run ID" for each view to precisely identify what apps ran in what order. But that plan was never reported or executed.
Currently, when two views from the same app are placed consecutively in a MMIF file, it is ambiguous: we cannot determine whether a single app instance generated two or more views, or if the same app ran two or more times legally.
Proposed Implementation
Our tentative conclusion at the meeting was to re-purpose the timestamp field in the view metadata.
- Current behavior: The mmif-python SDK automatically generates a unique timestamp for every new view when it is created.
- New behavior: We will overwrite this value inside the App's annotate method. By assigning the exact same timestamp (or unique run identifier) to all views generated during a single execution, we can group them effectively.
Related
This will impact the "workflow ID" generation that's being discussed in clamsproject/mmif-python#326 , and in turn will impact the storage structure of the in-house datahouse implementation (clamsproject/aapb-brandeis-datahousing#11)
Alternatives
No response
Additional context
No response