Briefs

IBM announced plans to make available through open source its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology designed to support a new breed of software applications that can process text within documents and other content sources to understand the latent meaning, relationship and relevant facts buried within.

There has been an explosion of "unstructured" information in the enterprise and across the web, taking the form of documents, images, comment and note fields, e-mail and even rich media like video and audio. However, the technology has not existed to allow software to search out and make sense of these disparate forms of data. UIMA provides an open software framework with standard interfaces for adding unstructured information analytics to any application. This framework makes it easy to integrate the analytic software tools and end-to-end enterprise applications across several different vendors. UIMA also provides tools to speed the creation of new, reusable analytic software components to handle unstructured information.

The technology will be presented to Open Source Technology Group with availability through SourceForge expected by the end of year 2005. The UIMA framework can currently be downloaded free of charge from IBM AlphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima .

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