IBM today said it would offer, for free, its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) technology, to allow businesses to search through vast amounts of unstructured corporate data to find underlying relationships, meanings, and concepts, without relying on simple keywords, report Reuters and CNET. To that end, IBM will release today a new version of its WebSphere Information Integration OmniFind Edition information management tool, which searches unstructured data in databases, email files, audio recordings, pictures and video images.
The amount of unstructured information on the web - documents, images, comment and note fields, email and rich media such as video and audio - has grown exponentially, but keyword-based search is able to merely scratch the surface of that mass of data.
"I don't see any of the major players moving into this area," Arthur Ciccolo, head of search technology at IBM Research, is quoted as saying regarding the focus of consumer internet search companies - such as Google, Yahoo, MSN - on the public web instead of private record data retrieval.
Projects using IBM's technology include an advanced intelligence system for antiterrorism and law enforcement, and a quality-control early-warning system for the automotive industry to search through warranty claims, repair requests and call-center logs to identify potential problems.
"It probably will take some time for the various commercial products to put this software developers' kit to use and allow for their products to take part in the interoperability process," said Dana Gardner, an analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
The new search framework is the result of more than four years of development by IBM Research, with contributions from researchers at universities, support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and military contractors, IBM said.
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