SingleTextualConverter.java

/*
 * File:                SingleTextualConverter.java
 * Authors:             Justin Basilico
 * Company:             Sandia National Laboratories
 * Project:             Cognitive Foundry Text Core
 * 
 * Copyright February 01, 2011, Sandia Corporation.
 * Under the terms of Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000, there is a non-exclusive 
 * license for use of this work by or on behalf of the U.S. Government. Export 
 * of this program may require a license from the United States Government. 
 */

package gov.sandia.cognition.text.convert;

import gov.sandia.cognition.data.convert.DataConverter;
import gov.sandia.cognition.text.Textual;

/**
 * Interface for an {@code  TextConverter} that converts an input into a single
 * output. This is usually done to encapsulate a strategy for
 * transforming an object so that it can be used in text analysis, such as
 * being fed into tokenization for a term extraction pipeline.
 *
 * @param   <InputType>
 *      The type of input that can be converted to a textual form.
 * @param   <OutputType>
 *      The type of textual output of the converter. Must implement the
 *      {@code Textual} interface.
 * @author  Justin Basilico
 * @since   3.1
 */
public interface SingleTextualConverter<InputType, OutputType extends Textual>
    extends DataConverter<InputType, OutputType>,
        TextualConverter<InputType, OutputType>
{

    /**
     * Convert an input into its single textual form.
     *
     * @param   input
     *      The input to convert.
     * @return
     *      The output textual object.
     */
    public OutputType convert(
        final InputType input);

}