What is UIMA?
Major Changes in this Release
How to Get Involved
How to Report Issues
List of JIRA Issues Fixed in this Release
Migrating from IBM UIMA to Apache 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.
The UIMA Framework has had many enhancements to support the effective use of large memory machines have many multiple-cores. Embedders can now run framework setups in parallel on multi-core machines, using a shared common Resource Manager object and shared UIMA Context objects.
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.
The Apache UIMA project uses JIRA for issue tracking. Please report any issues you find at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/uima
This section describes how to move from pre-Apache versions of UIMA to the Apache version (starting with Apache UIMA 2.1).
Note: Before running the migration utility, be sure to back up your files, just in case you encounter any problems, because the migration tool updates the files in place in the directories where it finds them.
The migration utility is run by executing the script file apache-uima/bin/ibmUimaToApacheUima.bat (Windows) or apache-uima/bin/ibmUimaToApacheUima.sh (UNIX). You must pass one argument: the directory containing the files that you want to be migrated. Subdirectories will be processed recursively.
The script scans your files and applies the necessary updates, for example replacing the com.ibm package names with the new org.apache package names.
The script will only attempt to modify files with the extensions: java, xml, xmi, wsdd, properties, launch, bat, cmd, sh, ksh, or csh; and files with no extension. Also, files with size greater than 1,000,000 bytes will be skipped. (If you want the script to modify files with other extensions, you can edit the script file and change the -ext argument appropriately.)
If the migration tool reports warnings, there may be a few additional steps to take. The following two sections explain some simple manual changes that you might need to make to your code.
If you have run JCasGen it is likely that you have the classes com.ibm.uima.jcas.tcas.DocumentAnnotation and com.ibm.uima.jcas.tcas.DocumentAnnotation_Type as part of your code. This package name is no longer valid, and the migration utility does not move your files between directories so it is unable to fix this.
If you have not made manual modifications to these classes, the best solution is usually to just delete these two classes (and their containing package). There is a default version in the uima-document-annotation.jar file that is included in Apache UIMA. If you have made custom changes, then you should not delete the file but instead move it to the correct package org.apache.uima.jcas.tcas. For more information about JCas and DocumentAnnotation please see Section 5.5.4, "Adding Features to DocumentAnnotation" in the UIMA References manual.
The deprecated method JCas.getDocumentAnnotation has been removed. Its use must be replaced with JCas.getDocumentAnnotationFs. The method JCas.getDocumentAnnotationFs() returns type TOP, so your code must cast this to type DocumentAnnotation. The reasons for this are described in Section 5.5.4, "Adding Features to DocumentAnnotation" in the UIMA References manual.
For most users there should not be any additional migration steps necessary. However, if the migration tool reported an additional warning or if you are having trouble getting your code to compile or run after running the migration, please see Section 1.4.2. "Rare Cases Where Additional Manual Migration is Necessary," in the Overview and Setup manual.