Early last month, OASIS announced the approval of the Unstructured Information Management Architecture Version 1.0. This standard creates an open method for accessing unstructured information - that is, any information that is created by and for people, and is not inherently machine-readable (e.g., not data). UIMA can potentially become very important since it provides a standard mechanism to exchange metadata for all types of unstructured content - documents, web pages, email, voice, images and video.
As we all have heard repeated in the marketing messages of every content-related software company, over 80% of the data we run our businesses on is unstructured. In our business we help our clients tame their mountains of content by classifying it. Often we rely on technologies like auto-classification, entity extraction, and other analytics to tag content with metadata. Metadata helps us bring structure - and in turn semantics or meaning - to unstructured content.
Of course, each of these systems has its own API and its own methods of expressing the metadata it produces or consumes. This is where UIMA comes in. In the introduction to the UIMA standard, the team at OASIS describes a typical workflow in which various analytics packages may need to interact:
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