Other GATE Services
Contents
We also supply a range of professional services, described
- in the indicative price list below,
- on our customisation pages, and
- by our commercial partners.
1. Indicative professional services price list
The off-the-shelf prices are listed in the shop. Below an indicative price list for other GATE team products and services available from the University of Sheffield. To make a purchase please contact us. Summary:
| Product | Indicative Price |
| Free | |
| Free (LGPL) | |
| Free (LGPL) | |
| GATE Cloud Paralleliser | Free (AGPL), or commercial licence, or on Amazon EC2 |
| Free (LGPL) or on Amazon EC2 | |
| Free (AGPL) | |
| Community-based: free; | |
| At a scheduled course: from £250/week; | |
| From £750 per developer day — see below | |
| Project scoping and | From £1,750 — see below |
For other options contact our partners. For a more strategic relationship or to get access to pre-release GATE components please consider our sponsorship and partnering programme.
2. Core GATE
GATE core is free open source software (LGPL) downloadable 24/7 and supported by a large and active community of developers and users. GATE core will always be free and does not depend on any single organisation for its future.
Other GATE products and services (such as bespoke development and on-site training) are all based on GATE core, and are available under both open source and closed-source (commercial) licences, or as SaaS pay-per-use services in the cloud.
3. GATE Cloud Paralleliser
GATE Cloud Paralleliser is a parallel and distributed solution for large scale annotation tasks. It is available as
- open source software under the GNU Affero General Public Licence
- as commercially licenced closed-source software (contact us)
- as a hosted service on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- as a private cloud service on Ubuntu Server / Eucalyptus / etc.
The EC2 prices are listed in the shop and include:
- a registration fee
- a per VM hour charge depending on EC2 machine type
- Amazon data transfer fees supplied at cost
- Amazon EBS storage and backup fees as required supplied at cost
4. GATE Mímir
GATE Mímir (Multi-paradigm Information Management Index and Repository) is a massively scaleable multiparadigm index supporting Ontotext KIM and built on Ontotext's semantic repository family, GATE's annotation structures database plus MG4J full-text indexing.
Mímir is available as
- open source software under the GNU LGPL license
- as a hosted service on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- as a private cloud service on Ubuntu Server / Eucalyptus / etc.
The EC2 prices are listed in the shop and include:
- a registration fee
- a per VM hour charge depending on EC2 machine type
- Amazon data transfer fees supplied at cost
- Amazon EBS storage and backup fees as required supplied at cost
5. Technical Support
| Package | Max Email Response Time | Telephone Availability | Free Incidents | Remote Desktop | Virtualisation | Annual Registration Fee | Incident Fee |
| Basic | 48 working hours | None | 0 | No | No | £250 | £75 |
| Standard | 24 working hours | None | 5 | No | No | £450 | £75 |
| Premium | 12 working hours | Business hours | 10 | No | Yes | £1500 | £75 |
| Extreme | 12 hours 24/7 | 8am-6pm seven days | 15 | Yes | Yes | £4250 | £100 |
Notes
- Incident definition: we will discuss with you whether your issue constitutes an incident or not before going ahead (non-incident issues are not charged). (For example, if you mail us and say "I can't find the File menu!", and we say "Have you looked in the top right corner?", and you say "Ah! There it is!" then we won't charge you — although if you do that sort of thing a lot our response rate may tend towards the infinite. On the other hand, if you mail us and say "The Unicode Tokeniser has a problem with Ukranian" and we provide a fix, then we will charge you. If you mail us and say "I need to recognise Chinese steel industry joint ventures" we will say "please see the bespoke development price list".)
- Our response times are usually considerably lower than the maximums cited above.
- Virtualisation: we will set up a copy of the GATE environment that you're working with so that we can launch an exact duplicate of your software when dealing with support incidents.
- Remote desktop: we will share a desktop with you to aid understanding of your issues and explanation of workarounds etc.
- In all cases we will provide advice and, in the case of defect reports, attempt to identify a workaround and/or provide a correction. Corrections will be made available in snapshot builds or redeployed server instances as appropriate.
6. On-site Training
Intensive GATE training courses are available in Sheffield every few months. For training at other times and/or other places the following prices apply:
- £1000 per day remote training via desktop share
- £2500 per day on-site for 1 trainer and up to 10 students
- £3250 per day on-site for 2 trainers and up to 10 students
- £250 per day on-site for each additional person up to 20
GATE Certification (basic, advanced, guru) is available at a per-person cost of: £90 (student); £240 (academic); £420 (commercial).
Discounts are available for:
- 5-day programmes
- courses which are located at Sheffield (UK), Sofia (BG), Montreal (CA) or New Haven CT (US)
7. Bespoke Development
Flat rate short-duration development projects are available from Sheffield at €825 (£750) per person-day for small projects. For larger projects we will discount these rates dependent on:
- project duration; for example we discount our flat rate charges for projects
larger than 20 person-days:
- 1-20 days = £750 per day (€825)
- 21-45 days = £600 per day (€665)
- 1.5-6 months = £500 per day (€555)
- 6 months+ = £400 per day (€450)
- alignment of project requirements with our own R&D plans
- prospects for future work resulting from the project
(Please note that prices and discounts are subject to schedule constraints — if we have a full order book or you're in a particular hurry we may be unable to offer our lowest prices.)
We can also provide breakdowns based on the distribution of different types of staff required.
Typically a short-duration investigative feasibility study (e.g. 1 or 2 person weeks) is the best first step. Contact us to discuss your needs.
Bespoke development is also available from Ontotext.
8. Project Scoping and Inception Service
Need to get your GATE project running quickly? Want to ensure best practices? Not sure which parts of the GATE suite are best for your needs? Need some hints from the experts?
Our project scoping and inception service will help you get the ball rolling with minimal overhead. The service packages up the first steps of the GATE process in a short consultation exercise that will transfer a lot of knowledge to your team as quickly and efficiently as possible. The core of the work is done during face-to-face (or virtual) discussion sessions with core GATE team members, ranging from half a day to two days.
The service is available at 3 levels:
- Basic scoping and tailored technical recommendations: £1,750.
- Full scoping, tailored technical recommendations and best practices cheat sheet: £2,975.
- Full scoping, tailored technical recommendations, best practices cheat sheet and tailored training session: £4,825.
The elements of these packages are as follows:
- Initial email discussion to elicit a first-cut definition of your requirements, collect a minimal exemplar data set and define the agenda for face-to-face (or virtual) scoping meeting(s).
- Scoping meetings (level 1: 3.5 hours; level 2: 2x 3.5 hours or 1 day; level
3: 3x 3.5 hours). Several members of our team will participate (including at
least one of our senior staff), covering all the relevant areas of
GATE-based technology and projects. A typical agenda includes:
- background and context
- problem definition and data characteristics (domain specificity, task complexity, time and space constraints)
- interactive GATE family master classes
- Q&A and problem-solving
- Technical discussion summary report and recommendations for next steps.
- Best practices cheat sheet: a tailored report on our analysis of your problem and our recommendations for the best way to go about solving it according to your priorities (e.g. quick and dirty vs. general and reusable).
- Tailored training sessions (level 3: 3.5 hours). Slideware, hands-on exercises, Q&A and problem-solving.
The meeting elements can be provided in Sheffield, on-site at the customer (subject to expenses) or on-line. In the latter case we favour video conferencing plus desktop share, for which the requisite bandwidth needs to be available at the client side.
To make an order please contact us.
9. Terms and Conditions
All our products and services are provided without warranty.
All invoices are payable on receipt. Cloud computing time is payable in advance on a voucher system (see above).
