Towards the next generation of enterprise search technology

Unstructured information represents the vast majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises. Exploiting this information requires systems for managing and extracting knowledge from large collections of unstructured data and applications for discovering patterns and relationships. This paper elucidates the differences between search systems for the Web and those for enterprises, with an emphasis on the future of enterprise search systems. It also introduces the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and provides the context for the unstructured information management (UIM) papers that follow. © 2004 IBM.