Companies hoping to glean actionable insight from the unstructured data pulsing through their business systems got a boost today with the announcement of a new open standard for unstructured information.

OASIS, a non-profit body that promotes open technology standards, today revealed that its members had approved Version 1.0 of the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). The ratification of UIMA as an OASIS standard is the highest level of recognition within the organization.

“UIMA standardizes semantic search and content analytics, providing a common method for meaningfully accessing [unstructured] data,” the group said in a statement. That information realm, which exists mostly outside financial and transactional systems, includes such increasingly popular methods of communication as e-mail, blogs, news feeds, and even podcasts, images, and videos.

“Unstructured information … includes documents found on the Web, plus an estimated 80% of the information generated by enterprises around the world,” OASIS stated today.

Members of the committee that worked to develop UIMA include data management specialist EMC Corp., Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, University of Manchester, University of Tokyo, and U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

"The approval of UIMA as an OASIS standard represents a significant milestone in the areas of semantic analysis and search," said David Ferrucci of IBM, chair of the UIMA Technical Committee, in a statement. "UIMA enables interoperability among a variety of application-specific analysis engines, allowing the capture of a broad range of knowledge from unstructured sources. The results can then be used by search engines, databases, or knowledge bases, ultimately delivering more value from all types of unstructured information by discovering relationships, identifying patterns, and predicting outcomes."

Enterprise software vendors have shadowed the emergence of the searchable Internet by baking ever-improving search capabilities into their own software. Before SAP acquired the company in January 2008, business intelligence pioneer Business Objects had snatched up Inxight, a small vendor specializing in unstructured search. Enterprise software provider IFS has also been aggressive in its development of content management and search functionality, while SAP rival Oracle made its own acquisition to augment its unstructured search capabilities, folding Stellant, Inc. into its portfolio late in 2006.