The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is an architecture and software framework for creating, discovering, composing and deploying a broad range of multi-modal analysis capabilities. We propose a project to develop, implement, support and enhance UIMA framework implementations that comply with the UIMA standard (being put forward concurrently for standardization within OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org - not yet submitted, but we plan to do this early in September.).
What is a a framework for "multi-modal analysis capabilities"? Something I would find helpful for all projects in the Apache Software Foundation is that they have some sort of highly visible/easily available description of what they are in terms that are clear to a user who may not be versed in the particular technology of the specific codebase. To be fair, there are other projects already present in the foundation that arent' as clear as they could be (one common irritant is "implementation of JSR blah blah" without an explanation of what that is or what it's good for, or a direct link to that explanation), so I'm just using this as an opportunity to speak up, rather than citing this as some sort of egregious violator of this principle.
Motivation for UIMA: Databases are core components of nearly all applications; they store information in structured tables. But more and more of the available digital data is unstructured (e.g. email, web documents, images, audio clips, video streams) with little information (metadata) attached to explain its content or context. Although many applications have been built to process unstructured data, they have either managed it as a BLOB or they have developed isolated applications for analyzing the content. In the absence of a standardized means for analytical applications to share insights extracted from the content, analytical applications cannot build upon one another. As a result, the industry has barely begun to tap the value locked in unstructured information.
Aha... I think this starts to get at what I want to know. Personally, were I writing this, I might consider puting this at or near the top for the benefit of those who don't immediately recognize what the software does. It sounds potentially useful once I read the above.
UIMA was built to help developers create solutions that get more value from unstructured information more quickly and at lower cost by making it easy to reuse and combine analytic modules from different sources into new analytic applications. The architecture and the framework have been validated through work with USA's DARPA which is using it as a standard for key projects
Some sort of example of what they've done wouldn't be bad either, but that's just nitpicking. Thankyou, -- David N. Welton - http://www.dedasys.com/davidw/ Linux, Open Source Consulting - http://www.dedasys.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
