Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) for C++ v2.4.0 Release Notes

1. What is UIMA?. 1

2. Major Changes in this Release. 2

3. List of Issues Fixed in this Release. 2

4. Release Compatibility. 3

5. Known Issues. 3

6. How to Get Involved. 4

7. How to Report Issues. 4

8. More Documentation on Apache UIMA C++. 4

1. What is UIMA?

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. UIMA is a framework and SDK for developing such applications. 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 such an application to be decomposed into components, for example "language identification" -> "language specific segmentation" -> "sentence boundary detection" -> "entity detection (person/place names etc.)". Each component must implement interfaces defined by the framework and must provide self-describing metadata via XML descriptor files. The framework manages these components and the data flow between them. Components are written in Java or C++; the data that flows between components is designed for efficient mapping between these languages. UIMA additionally provides capabilities to wrap components as network services, and can scale to very large volumes by replicating processing pipelines over a cluster of networked nodes.

Apache UIMA is an Apache-licensed open source implementation of the UIMA specification (that specification is, in turn, being developed concurrently by a technical committee within OASIS , a standards organization). We invite and encourage you to participate in both the implementation and specification efforts.

UIMA is a component framework for analysing unstructured content such as text, audio and video. It comprises an SDK and tooling for composing and running analytic components written in Java and C++, with some support for Perl, Python and TCL.

2. Major Changes in this Release

This section describes what has changed between version 2.3.0 and version 2.4.0 of UIMA C++.

2.1. Enhancements to C++ service wrapper for UIMA AS

Enabled support for ActiveMQ CPP failover protocol
Migrated to ActiveMQ CPP version 3.4.1.
Fixed bug with termination when C++ service is terminated by the UIMA AS Java controller.

2.2. Enchancements to Linux build

Standardized UIMA C++ SDK build and packaging. Please see the details on the wiki page https://cwiki.apache.org/UIMA/proposed-changes-to-uima-c-build-and-packaging.html .
Changes for GCC 4.3+ compatibility.

2.3. Updates to base UIMA C++ SDK

Migrated to APR version 1.3.8 and added APR-Util to binary distribution required by ActiveMQ CPP version 3.4.1.
SDK is built with ICU version 3.6. This requires rebuild of the UIMA C++ components as all UIMA C++ components must be built with the same version of ICU.
Implemented copyToArray and copyFromArray methods for Array type feature structures.
Fixed XMI serialization of empty string value.
Fixed missing TypeSystemDescription element when serializing AE metadata.
Fixed incorrect handling of sofa mapping in a UIMC C++ aggregate AE.

3. List of Issues Fixed in this Release

Issue Key	Summary
UIMA-2333	Build one source distribution which includes Windows and Linux files
UIMA-2328	Cleanup the Linux source distribution
UIMA-2312	Migrate UIMA C++ service wrapper to ACTIVEMQ CPP 3.4.1
UIMA-2307	BasicArrayFS has two unimplemented Functions: copyToArray, copyFromArray.
UIMA-2053	Changes to standardize UIMA C++ build and packaging on Linux
UIMA-1964	UIMA C++ service wrapper is not correctly shutting down when Java controller terminates
UIMA-1941	UIMA CPP aggregate AE incorrect handling of sofa mapping
UIMA-1940	TypeSystemDescription element missing when Aggregate AE metadata is serialized to XML
UIMA-1925	Enable failover protocol support in UIMA C++ service wrapper
UIMA-1913	Replace usage of ActiveMQ CPP utitlity APIs with APR functions
UIMA-1912	Changes for GCC 4.3+ compatibilty and header file conventions
UIMA-1886	XMI serialization incorrectly handling string feature set to an empty string
UIMA-2328	Cleanup Linux source distribution
UIMA-2333	Build one source distribution that includes Linux and Windows files.
UIMA-2348	Augment UIMACpp binary lic/notice with appropriate items from other embedded binaries.
UIMA-2352	Build script for uimacpp sdk on Windows does not correctly copy scriptators docs and xerces libs.
UIMA-2356	Fix warnings generated when creating the UIMA C++ doxygen docs.
UIMA-2361	UIMA C++ fails to build with gcc 4.5.2.
UIMA-2362	Add APR 1.4.x to list of acceptable version to build UIMA C++
UIMA-2363	Add APR-Util libraries to the UIMA C++ binary package
UIMA-2365	UIMACPP build fails on Mac OS X stricmp unavailable replace with strcasecmp in deployCppService.hpp
UIMA-2425	Xerces exception messages not being properly converted to native code-page.
UIMA-2433	Scriptator makefiles modified to work with different newer versons of Python and SWIG.
UIMA-2466	APR-iconv missing from UIMA C++ Windows binary build

4. Release Compatibility

There are two distinct features of UIMA C++ to consider when dealing with release compatibility:

The framework dynamically loads annotators which are user code. The annotators make calls to UIMA C++ APIs

and are built with some version of the SDK. A possible scenario is for an application to run annotators that

were built with different releases of UIMA C++ SDK.

The SDK depends on ICU, XERCES, APR and ACTIVEMQ-CPP and a UIMA C++ SDK release is built with a particular version of these.

Binary compatibility therefore depends on the compatibility of these underlying libraries. In particular,

ICU and XERCES encode the major and minor release numbers in the APIs which restricts binary compatibility across

releases of these libraries.

An application running UIMA C++ is restricted to running one version of the ICU library

in a process and all annotators and underlying libraries must use the same ICU version.

We do not enforce binary compatibility when doing a release. Migrating to a new version of UIMA C++ may require rebuild of the annotators.

Installing UIMACPP SDK as a system-wide shared library is discouraged since we do not

have support for parallel versions. The include directory does not have version number and

there cannot be multiple versions of executables runAECpp and deployCppService.

4. Known Issues

The following are known open issues:

Parameter overrides are not supported for C++ aggregates.
Sofa Mapping is not supported for C++ Aggregate AE called from Java.

Contents

2.1. Enhancements to C++ service wrapper for UIMA AS

3. List of Issues Fixed in this Release

Build script for uimacpp sdk on Windows does not correctly copy scriptators docs and xerces libs.

Fix warnings generated when creating the UIMA C++ doxygen docs.