Our goal in creating this site is to provide the basis for a thriving community of UIMA developers who can announce, discuss, design, share, and critique UIMA-compliant components, resources and solutions.

The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is a software framework that supports rapid development and deployment of multimodal analytics - applications which provide value by processing human-readable text, audio and/or video in order to extract information, answer questions, summarize documents, etc.

At Carnegie Mellon, we are currently using UIMA for both research and education. UIMA is used as a framework for corpus annotation on the JAVELIN, RADAR and ROSETTA projects. UIMA has also been used as a framework for student homeworks and externally-sponsored projects in the Software Engineering for Information Systems course sequence.

Industrial Partners

UIMA has been adopted by commercial vendors as a platform for development and distribution of text analysis solutions. Vendors are encouraged to announce their components and solutions on the UIMA Component Repository; please contact ehn@cs.cmu.edu.

UIMA History

UIMA is the creation of IBM Research, and consists of a software development kit (SDK) that can be downloaded here.

In 2005, the US government sponsored the creation of the UIMA Working Group, a consortium of companies and universities committed to the exploration of UIMA as a framework for solving important NLP problems. As a result of the Working Group's activities, some existing resources (such as Stanford's OpenNLP toolkit) were integrated with UIMA. As a member of the Working Group, Carnegie Mellon became actively involved in the adaptation of UIMA for such tasks as multi-engine machine translation (GALE project) and large-scale annotation for question answering (JAVELIN project).

In early 2006, IBM published the UIMA source code on Source Forge. Simultaneously with that announcement, Carnegie Mellon agreed to support the creation of an open-source component repository for UIMA. UIMA is now available from the Apache Software Foundation

Getting Started with UIMA

• An overview of the UIMA architecture is covered in the IBM Systems Journal. For more detailed information about the architecture and the UIMA SDK please visit the UIMA SDK Users Guide and Reference.

• Download and install the UIMA SDK from alphaWorks. The SDK contains a detailed User's Guide and Reference, and a step-by-step tutorial to help you get started.

• Check our frequently asked questions list.