Design and implementation of the UIMA Common Analysis System

The Common Analysis System (CAS) is the subsystem in the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) that handles data exchanges between the various UIMA components, such as analysis engines and unstructured information management applications. CAS supports data modeling via a type system independent of programming language, provides data access through a powerful indexing mechanism, and provides support for creating annotations on text data. In this paper we cover the CAS design philosophy, discuss the major design decisions, and describe some of the implementation details.