Content analytics

IBM has announced major steps intended to assist in the open development and standardization of search and content analytics software.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) has established a technical committee to standardize the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) specification. Additionally, the Apache Software Foundation has established an incubator project for developing UIMA-based software. These efforts are based on IBM's development of UIMA software and its experience with clients and partners in deploying content analytic solutions.

The new Apache incubator project will start with an initial contribution from IBM of the UIMA Version 2.0 source code. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for open-source software projects characterized by a collaborative, consensus-based development process, an open, pragmatic software license and a desire to create high-quality software.

In addition, Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technology Institute is hosting a UIMA Component Repository, where developers can post information about their analytics components and anyone can find out more about free and commercially available UIMA-compliant analytics. Free analytic tools that can work with UIMA include those from the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) and OpenNLP communities. Commercial analytics are available from IBM, as well as from other software vendors such as Attensity, ClearForest, Temis and Nstein.