IBM, UIMA & Blogosphere

Jon Udell writes,"With a little help, UIMA could be a boon to unstructured data retrieval. He points to Irving Wladawsky-Berger’s involvement in various key initiatives of IBM like on-demand, open source, Linux , autonomic, and grid computing. Irving earlier revealed IBM’s plan to open source its UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) SDK. While the details are gnarly, the general plan will look familiar to anyone who’s thinking in terms of service-oriented architecture. The UIMA software provides a framework for coordinating many different text analyzers. Each runs as a service that consumes and produces data in common formats. Applications are composed by declaratively combining sets of analyzers. Using a potpourri of technologies, these analyzers pore through unstructured text looking for named entities (people, places, companies, or products, for example) and relationships among them. Then the analyzers tag these entities to enable structured search. Queries are XML fragments that can nest entities, such as “person” and “organization”, inside relationships, such as “president_of”. Such tagging if it were already present in the document, or linked to it by way of an external tagging service, would enable you to skip the rocket-science analysis phase and proceed directly to the query endgame.
As blogging begins to play a greater role in enterprise knowledge management, two strategies will present themselves :
- First, there’s social tagging. It’s true that the Web dwarfs the enterprise, but people who use social tagging services form small communities around specific tags. Maybe such communities can flourish at enterprise scale.
- The second strategy is microformats. The idea here is that your blogging tool should make it easy to post items that contain nuggets of structure. As I see it, these developments shall have the the potential to herald Blog 2.0.

Category :Categories: Blog 2.0