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.