The nora-db and nora-chunk architecture are specific to the Nora project and they are not extensible for use by other applications in an easy manner. The work on these apis started before UIMA became open-source and provided a collection processing engine and common analysis system. If these apis could be rewritten, the author would use UIMA or an existing work flow engine as the framework for Collection processing engine. The work flow part of the collection processing is pretty weak in nora-db.