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Technology: Making Sense of Unstructured Data
There’s another standard that’s in the works for the world of unstructured data: Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). It is a technology that was developed at IBM and has recently been approved as a standard by OASIS. Wikipedia describes UIMA as “component software architecture for the development, discovery, composition, and deployment of multi-modal analytics for the analysis of unstructured information and its integration with search technologies.” That’s a mouth-full.
UIMA defines a framework for a specialized software component to analyze and process an unstructured document. Structure is then applied to the document by marking it up with XML that contains the content within the document that was identified. For example, there might be a UMIA component that is able to recognize date formats — that component could identify those dates and the positions within the document where the dates occured. Another component may be able to identify placenames. A third component may be able to identify company names. UIMA components can be strung together to discover and infer information about an unstructured document. The result is structured XML annotation that is created for the unstructured document which can then be searched and piped into a relational database.
