Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) v3.0.2 Release Notes

Contents

What is UIMA?
Major Changes in this Release
How to Get Involved
How to Report Issues
List of JIRA Issues Fixed in this Release

1. What is 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.

Major Changes in this Release

Version 3.0.2 is a minor update to 3.0.1.

When migrating from v2, if non-built-in JCas cover classes are being used, a one-time regeneration or migration step is required for these. Please read the Version 3 users guide located in the docs directory for information on these changes and the migration tool which can aid in migrating existing JCas class definitions.

A very brief summary of version 3 vs version 2:

• Feature Structures become Java Objects, subject to Garbage Collection, just like any other objects, when no longer reachable.
• Iterating over indexes no longer throws ConcurrentModificationException.
• Support for arbitrary Java Objects in the CAS, using special custom implementations of JCas cover classes for those.
• Using the above new capability, new semi-built-ins for three new types: ArrayList style lists of Feature Structures and ints, and an FSHashSet
• New "select" framework for flexible access to Feature Structures, that can ignore typeOrdering keys in indexes.
• Integration with Java 8 facilities such as Streams
• Logging framework upgraded, supporting embedding UIMA in other frameworks using popular logging APIs
• There are many performance improvements

Please read the Version 3 users guide for more details.

Specific changes in this release that track the same changes in version 2.10.3 include

• The code and the build was adjusted to compile using both Java 8 and Java 11.
• The class loading when using the UIMA Class Loader now will first try loading from that class loader's URL list, and if not found will try using the Context Class Loader (if set), and if not found, then will default to how it previously searched for classes. Previously the Context Class Loader was never consulted.
• Fixed PEAR installation to no longer lock files.
• Pear Specifier parameters now passed to the wrapped Analysis Engine
• Implemented a destroy() method for ResourceManager which closes its UIMAClassLoader

Specific changes in release 3.0.2 versus 3.0.1 include

• supporting additional JCas use cases, where (due to changes in type systems) some feature might migrate over time from subclasses to superclasses.
• reverting some changes to APIs so the v3 APIs more closely match v2 for improved binary compatibility. Binary compatibility improves the ability to run using UIMA v3 without recompiling classes / Jars built using UIMA v2 (except for JCas classes).

API changes

There is an API compatibility report covering the non-internal APIs; see change report for the list of API changes since version 3.0.1.

Full list of JIRA Issues affecting this Release

Please use the mailing lists ( http://uima.apache.org/mail-lists.html ) for feedback.

How to Get Involved

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.

How to Report Issues

The Apache UIMA project uses JIRA for issue tracking. Please report any issues you find at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/uima