Andrews, who is a content specialist in the Software Group's Strategy and Business Development at IBM, said UIMA technology is embedded in different IBM products including WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition.
Does UIMA represent competition to established search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Andrews was asked?
"We believe it will eventually help the Googles and the Yahoos of this world," he said. "People are finding that typical keyword search and page ranking aren't enough. We're driving UIMA as a broad industry standard. There are 25 to 30 companies, a bunch of open source (organizations) and universities developing it."
UIMA was first unveiled in December of 2004 as a collaboration by several corporate and open source partners. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is using UIMA in intelligence applications to analyze huge volumes of speech and text in different languages.
Other companies at the vanguard of UIMA that are making developmental work widely available include ClearForest, Cognos, Factiva, and Nstein.