Unstructured Information Management & Its Architecture
By Sanjay Sharma, Section Tech News
Posted on Sun Dec 26, 2004 at 10:05:33 AM EST
IBM has been working on something interesting called UIMA. Unstructured information management (UIM) applications are software systems that analyze unstructured information
In analyzing unstructured information, UIM applications make use of a variety of analysis technologies, including statistical and rule-based Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), machine learning, and ontologies.
- UIMA is an architecture in which basic building blocks called Analysis Engines (AEs) are composed in order to analyze a document. At the heart of AEs are the analysis algorithms that do all the work to analyze documents and record analysis results (for example, detecting person names).
- These algorithms are packaged within components that are called Annotators. AEs are the stackable containers for annotators and other analysis engines. How Annotators represent and share their results is an important part of the UIMA architecture.
- To enable composition and reuse, UIMA defines a Common Analysis Structure (CAS) precisely for these purposes. The CAS is an object-based container that manages and stores typed objects having properties and values.
Object types may be related to each other in a single-inheritance hierarchy.
- The CAS serves as a common data object, shared among the annotators that are assembled for an application.
More details in the freely available IBM Systems Journal Special Issue on Unstructured Information Management, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2004
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