Compiling GATE

This post explains some steps of how to download and set up the GATE source code. This is needed when you would like to improve something.

SVN checkout: https://gate.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gate

Open Eclipse in a new workspace (recommended). Use File->Import->Existing Projects into workspace->select your gate source dir->Finish.
Use the "Java Element Filters" to hide all "Non-Java elements" to make your project more compact.

Update:
My problems were related to an error that prevented me from downloading all GATE files while svn checking out the source. The problem is due to the fact that a filename allowed on Linux is not allowed on Windows. It was about ".cow:no-iframe" and ":" is not allowed on Windows. This halts the entire svn checkout and made me do all sort of tweaks and patches. The GATE source is over 500 MB and 13 000 files, so make sure you have everything before trying to fix it like me. If you are having problems like me, you should try a checkout on Linux to see if it is an OS dependency. If you copy source from Linux to Windows then you need to check in Eclipse that Properties->Resource->Text File Encoding->other is set to "UTF8".

I am interested in refactoring the code of the Othomatcher. This is the processing resource that matches all annotations of the same entity that they are indeed referring to the same thing. This is needed when a person or an organization is mentioned in different forms in the same document.