IBM and UIMA
Analysis of IBM’s efforts in text analytics, especially its UIMA interoperability technology and proposed standard. Related subjects include:
- (in DBMS2) IBM in the database, middleware, and analytic technology markets
- (in The Monash Report) Operational and strategic issues for IBM
- (in Software Memories) Historical notes on IBM
Enterprise-specific web search: High-end web search/mining appliances?
OK. I have a vision of one way search could evolve, which I think deserves consideration on at least a “concept-car” basis. This is all speculative; I haven’t discussed it at length with the vendors who’d need to make it happen, nor checked the technical assumptions carefully myself. So I could well be wrong. Indeed, I’ve at least half-changed my mind multiple times this weekend, just in the drafting of this post. Oh yeah, I’m also mixing several subjects together here too. All-in-all, this is not my crispest post …
Anyhow, the core idea is that large enterprises spider and index a subset of the Web, and use that for most of their employees’ web search needs. Key benefits would include:
- Filtering out spam hits. This is obviously important for search, and in some cases could help with public-web text mining as well. It should be OK to be more aggressive on spam-site filtering in an enterprise-specific index than it is in general web search.
- Filtering out malicious/undesirable downloads of various sorts. I’m thinking mainly of malware/spyware here, but of course it can also be used for netnannying porn-prevention and the like as well. Again, this is more easily done for the enterprise market than for the search world at large. (I anyway think that Google could blow Websense out of the water any time they wanted to – except, of course, for the not-so-small matter of not being seen as participating in the censorship business — but that’s a separate discussion.)
- Capturing employees’ search strings. This could be useful for various purposes, including discerning their interests, and building the corporate ontology for internal web search.
- Freshness control. If there’s a site you really care about, you can make sure it’s re-indexed frequently.
| Categories: Categorization and filtering, Convera, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, IBM and UIMA, Search engines, Spam and antispam, Specialized search, Text mining, Website filtering | 1 Comment |
Lead UIMA architect Dave Ferrucci speaks about adoption
Dave Ferrucci, lead architect for UIMA, shared some detailed views with me about UIMA adoption. WIth his permission, they are reproduced below. UIMA is still not getting a lot of attention from commercial text analytics vendors, but ultimately I think it will prevail, if just because nobody cares enough to start a war of dueling alternative standards.* So it’s something you should educate yourself about as it progresses.
*And IBM plans to convince me ASAP that even that assessment is too negative, which it well may be. Stay tuned.
So to sum up — 1. We seem to have fair amount of traction with the UIMA framework by communities that are very interested in plug-n-play with components from other providers. This includes the government, life sciences and research communities. 2. The UIMA standard, as opposed to the specific Java Framework implementation, developed under an SDO will broaden the opportunity and strengthen the case of adoption of UIMA as a standard for text and multi-modal analytics that allows interoperability across different frameworks and applications. It would of course be the case that the Java UIMA Framework would comply to the standard.
The complete email follows.
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| Categories: About this blog, IBM and UIMA, Open source text analytics | 2 Comments |