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. 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 applications to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" => "language specific segmentation" => "sentence boundary detection" => "entity detection (person/place names etc.)".