Hello everyone - My colleagues and I are submitting this proposal to the community for a new project in the incubator, and look forward to starting to work with this community.
Proposal for Incubation Project: Unstructured Information Management Architecture - UIMA The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is an architecture and software framework for creating, discovering, composing and deploying a broad range of multi-modal analysis capabilities. We propose a project to develop, implement, support and enhance UIMA framework implementations that comply with the UIMA standard (being put forward concurrently for standardization within OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org - not yet submitted, but we plan to do this early in September.). The proposal includes both a UIMA framework, as well as tools to develop, describe, compose and deploy UIMA-based components and applications. The initial work will be based on the UIMA Version 2 framework code developed by IBM; snapshots of each release of this code are currently made available on http://sourceforge.net/projects/uima-framework. The SourceForge versions would be stabilized in maintenance mode, if we are successful in moving to Apache. The framework provides a run-time environment in which developers can plug in and run their UIMA component implementations and with which they can build and deploy UIM applications. The framework is not specific to any IDE or platform. Motivation for UIMA: Databases are core components of nearly all applications; they store information in structured tables. But more and more of the available digital data is unstructured (e.g. email, web documents, images, audio clips, video streams) with little information (metadata) attached to explain its content or context. Although many applications have been built to process unstructured data, they have either managed it as a BLOB or they have developed isolated applications for analyzing the content. In the absence of a standardized means for analytical applications to share insights extracted from the content, analytical applications cannot build upon one another. As a result, the industry has barely begun to tap the value locked in unstructured information. Standardization is key to achieve component interoperability, with capabilities to mix components developed in different places and in Java, C++ and other languages. The Unstructured Information Management Architecture defines standards for component interoperability and application composition that will provide this needed unifying standard, and allow a variety of framework implementations to exist, while preserving the goal of unstructured information analytic component reuse. This project provides both: * UIMA frameworks that provide runtime environments into which the developers can plug in and run their UIMA component implementations and * Tooling for the development, description, composition and deployment of UIMA components and applications. It will follow and conform to the emerging work on the UIMA standard being proposed as a new standards effort to the OASIS standards organization; we expect to submit this proposal to OASIS in early September. OASIS has an open approach to granting Technical Committee voting rights to members of OASIS, described here: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.php#2.4 UIMA was built to help developers create solutions that get more value from unstructured information more quickly and at lower cost by making it easy to reuse and combine analytic modules from different sources into new analytic applications. The architecture and the framework have been validated through work with USA's DARPA which is using it as a standard for key projects with several universities involved in advanced linguistics analysis, such as Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Stanford and University of Massachusetts. Other companies, such as the Mayo Clinic and Sloan Kettering, are also building efforts around UIMA. In addition, over 15 software vendors, including companies such as Inxight, Attensity, ClearForest, Temis, SPSS, SAS, Cognos, Endeca, Factiva and others, announced plans to support UIMA. The UIMA framework (binary and/or source code) has been downloaded over 8000 times from IBM alphaWorks (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima) or SourceForge (http://uima-framework.sourceforge.net). We believe that moving the UIMA framework development to the Apache development community will lead to faster innovation, better integration with other open source software, and broader adoption of UIMA, accelerating the industry's ability to get the most value from text, audio, and video content. The UIMA framework is becoming attractive to developers who want to build components; we believe that having UIMA on Apache will encourage the development of a basic set of open source components that will jumpstart these developers' efforts. One of the first components we see possible synergy with is a search component based on Apache Lucene that would enable semantic search. We like the concept of the Lucene Sandbox as a way to encourage innovation around UIMA, and would envision something similar for this project. Some initial work we see in the incubator include the following: * redoing the parts of the tooling that were done as derivative works of Eclipse source code, to enable everything to be licensable under the Apache license * extending the framework to better support "scale-out" * extending the framework to better align with the emerging UIMA Standards work * extending the framework to support XMI-based SOAP and/or other service interfaces * extending the framework to support OSGi-based approaches to componentization and packaging * exploring embeddings of the framework within other interested Apache projects, including synergies with Lucene * providing aids to the community to migrate from previous versions of the framework to the Apache version * setting up community support: hosting a facility similar to the Lucene Sandbox to encourage innovation and experimentation; establishing a wiki and some process to allow better documentation to be developed by the community, and linking our existing XHTML documentation via an XSL transform to Apache FOP ? Section 0.1 : Criteria ? Community: Currently, the UIMA Framework development is being done by IBM, with input from a group of early adopters in industry and government. Going forward, we see IBM continuing to support several committers working on it. We have already begun talking with other people outside of IBM that have expressed interest in contributing towards the development. This includes members of academic institutions, people working for some of the software vendors that have announced plans to support UIMA, and others from companies that have expressed interest since initial announcements about our open source plans. Multiple non-IBM people have already expressed desires to become committers. ? Core Developers: The previous core developers of UIMA are Adam Lally, Thilo Goetz, Marshall Schor, Edward Epstein, Jaroslaw Cwiklik and Thomas Hampp. Many others have also contributed. ? Alignment: UIMA has significant synergy with search applications, and we expect to see integration with Lucene in the future. UIMA makes use of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) for C++ support. It is designed to be embeddable into other frameworks, such as web application servers. Part of UIMA is Eclipse-based tooling. We use ANT for build scripting. UIMA has support for various language bindings including C++ and Java; we also have more limited bindings for Perl, Python, and TCL. UIMA uses Web Services as part of its approach to wiring up components in its domain. It makes use of XML services such as Xerces and Xalan. ? License: The current license for the source code is CPL, with a small number of files licensed under the EPL (Eclipse Public License), because these were created as "derivative works" of existing Eclipse open source code. When the code base is moved to Apache, it will be relicensed under the Apache license, except for the small number of files licensed under the EPL as derivative works of Eclipse source files. We plan to work in the incubator to redo these parts, so the entire offering can be licensed under the Apache license. The distribution for the C++ enablement layer includes open source components ICU (a Unicode package) which has its own license. We plan to work with community to properly make use of this non-Apache licensed component. Our current vision for the future of UIMA has it aligning with and incorporating other standards-based open source components/protocols, some of which may have licensing other than the Apache license (for example, the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI), and the EMF ECore Model from Eclipse); we will work with the community in figuring out how to move forward on this. ? Orphaned Software: UIMA has been in active development for 5 years. The community of users has steadily grown, and there are now significant commercial and research organizations actively using it. UIMA is embedded in IBM software products and is delivered through IBM services engagements. IBM has developers assigned to it, and is continuing to support its development. In addition, several people outside of IBM have already expressed interest in working on UIMA, and have been providing IBM with initial feedback. One of the objectives of starting this Apache project is to provide a meritocratic structure for those people to begin more actively contributing to UIMA. ? Experience With Open Source: The individuals working on this software have background as IBM software developers. While many of them have experience working with open source software, none of them has had extensive experience contributing to other open source software. However, IBM as an organization, has extensive experience contributing to open source projects and will make available resources to provide guidance to the developers working on this project. ? Homogenous Developers: (work for same company?) Currently all the developers work for IBM, although they come from different geographically dispersed organizations within IBM. We will reach out during the incubation time to get others to contribute; we have already received interest from several parties. ? Reliance on salaried developers: Currently the developers are paid employees of IBM. ? No Ties to Other Apache Products: We make use of several Apache components (SOAP / Web Services, XML (Xerces, Xalan), languages (Perl), scripting languages (ANT), Apache Portable Runtime. In addition, UIMA has been embedded in other frameworks, such as web application servers, and integrated with search engines. We are exploring Lucene extensions that could take advantage of UIMA processed data. We are currently investigating and prototyping some software packaging concepts based on OSGi; the Apache Incubator project Felix may have relevance as we go forward. The documentation is being moved to XHTML and plans to use Apache FOP for producing PDF reference materials. ? Achieving the Apache Brand is a Prominent Goal: UIMA is already being adopted by a wide cross section of users, both commercial and academic, world-wide. Our experience shows that analytic modules can be reused and combined through UIMA making it easier and faster for developers to build new analytic applications for specific industries or domains. Given the diversity of content and analytics that will be required to address the multitude of opportunities - from military intelligence to quality assurance to contact center analytics -- growing this infrastructure so that it better aligns with other major Open Source communities should help accelerate industry's ability to get value from content assets. We believe that the Apache community of developers has the experience, background, visibility, and synergistic resources to encourage and foster a vibrant developer community around this project. ? Section 1 : Scope of the project The project will develop implementations of the UIMA architecture (which is concurrently being submitted to the OASIS standards process), supporting the breadth of platforms that developers working in this field are using, including Java, C++, Perl, Python and TCL; and utilities and tooling to support component and application developers and assemblers / packagers. It will initially include the Java UIMA framework for UIMA Version 2 (you can see a snap shot of the Version 2 release SourceForge; the delivered code would this code base plus normal incremental bug fixes and improvements), plus additional components (mainly documentation and test cases, which are not currently on SourceForge). Over time, the project is expected grow to include supporting various embeddings and integrations with other Apache components such as search engines and web application frameworks. Over time, we envision the project becoming an umbrella for related open-source around UIMA, including things like open-source pre-annotated corpora, and hosting a facility similar to the Lucene Sandbox to encourage innovation and experimentation. The UIMA framework is primarily a set of libraries (in Java, C++, Perl, etc.), test cases, and UIMA utilities and tools (scripts, plugins, executables, etc.) used to build, test and debug UIMA analytic components. The tooling includes several Eclipse platform plugins. ? Section 2 : Initial source from which the project is to be populated The source currently is maintained in IBM internal software control systems. At the time of launch, we plan to contribute the latest version of the code base (with some renaming of package prefixes to reflect apache.org), test cases, build files, and documentation, under the terms specified in the ASF Corporate Contributor License. We plan to donate the existing C++ enablement layer and the support for Perl, Python, and TCL a few months later than the initial donation; this delay is to give us time to finish preparing that code base for Open Source. ? Section 3: Identify the ASF resources to be created ? Section 4: Identify the Initial Set of Committers Michael Baessler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Edward Epstein ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Thilo Goetz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Adam Lally ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Marshall Schor ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ? Section 5: Identify ASF Sponsor ? Sponsor: We are requesting the Incubator to sponsor this. Our current vision is that it will become a top level project (other projects that develop UIMA components could become subprojects, for instance). ? Mentors: Sam Ruby ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Ken Coar ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ? Section 6: Open Issues for Discussion -Marshall Schor (msa at sign schor dot com)
