Disabling modalities and routing file types

By default, projects in BDA process supported file types, by sorting them to different semantic modalities. When creating or editing your project, you can modify what modalities will be processed, and which file types will be sent to which modalities. In this section, we will go through enabling and disabling different modalities, routing files to specific modalities, and the default routing procedure for BDA.

Disabling modality processing

When you create a project, you might have a use case in mind that doesn't include processing all kinds of files. For example, you may want to only process documents and audio files. If that is the case, you don't want BDA to send a JPEG to be processed as an image or an MP4 to be processed as a video. Modality enablement allows you to turn off certain modalities in a project, curating responses from BDA's processing.

Disabling modalities with the BDA Console

When using the BDA console, modality enablement is handled by a checklist, where you can simply select or deselect each modality while editing or creating your Project. These options are located under the Advanced settings tab. At least one Modality must be selected for a project.

Disabling modalities with the BDA API

When using the BDA API, modality enablement is handled by the overrideConfiguration request element, located in the CreateDataAutomation operation. Each modality has an associate section where you can declare the modality ENABLED or DISABLED. Below is an example of the overrideConfiguration element with only document and audio modalities enabled. The modalityProcessing flag defaults to ENABLED.

   "overrideConfiguration" : {
    "document" : {
        "splitter": {
            "state": ENABLED
        },
        "modalityProcessing": {
            "state": ENABLED
        },
    },
    "image" : {
        "modalityProcessing": {
            "state": DISABLED
        },
    },
    "video" : {
        "modalityProcessing": {
            "state": DISABLED 
        },
    },
    "audio" : {
        "modalityProcessing": {
            "state": ENABLED
        },
    }
    ...
   }
  

The ellipsies at the end of this section indicates the removal of the modalityRouting element, which we will discuss more in the next section.

Routing files to certain processing types

Certain file types are capable of being routed to different modalities, based on a variety of factors. With modality routing you can set certain file types to route to certain modality processing manually. JPEGs and PNGs can be routed to either document or image processing. MP4s and MOVs can be routed to either video or audio processing.

Routing with the BDA Console

While in the Advanced settings tab when creating or editing a blueprint, you can choose to add a new manual modality routing. This lets you select one of the 4 available file types and then which processing modality they will be routed to. Below is a screenshot of the console, with a manual modality routing that sends PNG files to the document processing modality.

Routing with the BDA API

Similar to modality enablement, modality routing is handled via the overrideConfiguration request element. Below is an example of the modalityRouting portion of overrideConfiguration. This example assumes all modalities are enabled, and routes JPEG and PNG files to the document modality, and MP4 and MOV files to the audio modality.

   ...
   "modalityRouting": {
        "jpeg": DOCUMENT, 
        "png": DOCUMENT,  
        "mp4": AUDIO,     
        "mov": AUDIO      
    }
}
  

The ellipsies at the beginning of the example indicate the removal of the rest of the overrideConfiguration, which is discussed more in the section on modality enablement and the document splitter functionality.

Standard routing for BDA

Without setting up your own routing procedures, BDA uses a standard set of procedures based on file type to determine what modality BDA will route to. The default procedures are listed in the table below.

PNGs and JPEGs list Semantic Classifer as a default behavior. This means that BDA will look at indicators of whether or not a submitted file is an image or a document using internal models and perform routing automatically.