IBM just announced its 2007 UIMA Innovation Award. to encourage college or university faculty members in working on this Unstructured Information Management Architecture.

Several ASF projects are mentioned in the description, including (obviously) the incubating Apache UIMA, but also Jackrabbit and Lucene. They forgot Solr, but if something happens in Lucene it should trickle down to Solr eventually.

The scope of UIMA is not entirely clear to me, but as I understand it is meant to be a framework to plugin unstructured information extraction tools, for natural language processing for example.

Making sense of unstructured information is a huge topic now in press and news circles, so it's good to see such efforts associated with Apache projects!

In a much more modest sense, Tika is also a small step towards making sense of our masses of data, and recent discussions show that momentum is also building up there.