IBM has released the source code of its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) technology to the open source community.

The Java-based technology enables the analysis of information in unstructured files such as documents, images, comments, email messages and multimedia files.

Rather than perform search queries based on keywords, UIMA allows users to look for concepts and related topics.

"We are making UIMA available to the open source community to encourage innovation and allow analytics software tools from multiple sources to work together and build on each other," said Nelson Mattos, vice president of information and interaction at IBM Research.

UIMA was first unveiled in 2004 and was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and IBM.

The technology has been adopted by several organisations including the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a foundation to develop knowledge management applications.

UIMA is also supported by knowledge management vendors including ClearForest, Cognos and Factiva.

The UIMA code is governed by the Common Public Licence, an official licence approved by the Open Source Initiative. The code has been made available on the SourceForge website.

IBM will act as the project's steward for now, but intends to move UIMA to a full open source community development model later this year.