IBM announced plans to make available through open source its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology designed to support software applications that can process text within documents and other content sources to understand the latent meaning, relationship and relevant facts buried within. UIMA provides an open software framework with standard interfaces for adding unstructured information analytics to any application. This framework makes it easy to integrate the analytic software tools and end-to-end enterprise applications across several different vendors. UIMA also provides tools to speed the creation of new, reusable analytic software components to handle unstructured information. The result of more than 4 years of development by IBM Research, UIMA has also received significant support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA and IBM formed a working group consisting of experienced research members who have contributed their expertise in unstructured information management to the evolution of UIMA. The contributors included several universities, along with industrial research and development organizations. Some of the universities that participated, such as Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Stanford University and The University of Massachusetts Amherst, are already using UIMA in courses and research projects. The other organizations actively supporting and using UIMA include Science Applications International Corp., BBN Technologies, The Mayo Clinic and MITRE Corporation. In addition, commercial adoption of UIMA was announced among more than 15 software vendors. The UIMA framework has already been embedded in IBM products, including IBM WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition, the first commercially available software platform for processing content based on UIMA. IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Work Place also leverage UIMA for content processing. The UIMA framework can currently be downloaded free of charge from IBM AlphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima