Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) v2.9.0 Release Notes

Contents

What is UIMA?
Major Changes in this Release
How to Get Involved
How to Report Issues
List of JIRA Issues Fixed in this Release

1. What is UIMA?

Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at. UIMA enables such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

Apache UIMA is an Apache-licensed open source implementation of the UIMA specification (that specification is, in turn, being developed concurrently by a technical committee within OASIS, a standards organization). We invite and encourage you to participate in both the implementation and specification efforts.

UIMA is a component framework for analysing unstructured content such as text, audio and video. It comprises an SDK and tooling for composing and running analytic components written in Java and C++, with some support for Perl, Python and TCL.

Major Changes in this Release

• Two new features were added.
  • CasIOUtls - a collection of general-purpose CAS load/save utilities, with support for including the type system and index definition information along with the Feature Structures.
  • A new set of APIs allowing use of the external shared settings files to be used directly, rather than only by overriding UIMA configuration parameters. These APIs give direct access by the external settings file's key names to the key values.
• many bugs were fixed, including:
  • A regression which broke the unambiguous AnnotationIndex iterator in some cases.
  • Updates to the Eclipse plugins to work with the latest Eclipse (4.6, Neon) version.
  • Sofa mapping support for flow controllers.
  • fixing a stack overflow error in AnnotationViewer when switching Sofas.
  • fixing 2 JSON serialization issues: mishandling of arrays of FeatureStructures having null entries, and mishandling of namespaces for uninstantiated types found as supertypes.

API changes

There were no User API changes that affect backward compatibility. New classes org.apache.uima.util.CasIOUtils, org.apache.uima.util.CasLoadMode were added, and additions were made to the SerialFormat enum (not disturbing previous values) and to the CasRuntimeException list of exceptions.

Full list of JIRA Issues Fixed in this Release

How to Get Involved

The Apache UIMA project really needs and appreciates any contributions, including documentation help, source code and feedback. If you are interested in contributing, please visit http://uima.apache.org/get-involved.html.

How to Report Issues

The Apache UIMA project uses JIRA for issue tracking. Please report any issues you find at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/uima