The GATE Way to Open Source Text Analytics

As part of a recent solution-provider survey, I posed the question, "What do you see as the 3 (or fewer) most important text-analytics technology, solution, or market challenges [or opportunities] in 2010?" to Hamish Cunningham, Research Professor of Internet Computing at the University of Sheffield (UK). Hamish is benevolent dictator of the GATE team, "researching human language computation." Their work is realized in a highly capable, open-source, text-analysis platform, the General Architecture for Text Engineering. I've used it myself!

Hamish is effectively GATE's CEO. While GATE work is funded in part by a number of sponsors and partners, Hamish is not beholden to VCs or shareholders and is decidedly uncorporate, that is, he'll tell you what he really thinks and what he's up to, openly. Check out his blog, Computing Text. One thing he's doing is shifting the GATE team to focus on users and support, by nurturing the GATE community and via a number of carefully conceived industry alliances. (Disclosure: I am a paid consultant to a GATE partner, Matrixware, a Vienna based services firm that is working with the Univ. of Sheffield and Bulgarian semantic-technologies developer Ontotext to build GATE into a commercially friendly product suite. My enthusiasm for GATE led to the consulting assignment, not the reverse.)

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