Definitions

The Basic building blocks of UIMA are called Analysis Engines (AEs).

Analysis Results are the descriptive meta-data produced by the AE about the
document content.

The Analysis Results may include information about the regions of the document called span.

The Analysis Results can be of different type for example Person, Topic.

The results are shared between the annotators using a Common Analysis Structure (CAS).

CAS is an object-based data structure that allows the representation of objects properties and values.
UIMA defines only a few CAS basic types but developers can extend these to define an arbitrary rich Type System.
Types can have features or properties for example Age and Occupation maybe defined as features of Person Type.

Annotation Type is the general and common type from which additional types are often derived.

AEs analyze one or more views of a document. Each view contains a specific subject of analysis (SOFA),
plus a set of indexes holding meta-data indexed by that view. The CAS, overall, holds one or more CAS Views, plus the descriptive objects that represents the analysis results for each.

Component Descriptors : New AEs and Annotators can be created by writing a declarative meta-data that describes the identity, structure and behavior, this is called Component Descriptors. The AEs and Annotators have two parts the
component descriptor and code.

Aggregate Analysis Engine: AEs containing other AEs are called Aggregate Analysis Engines.
Aggregate AE's descriptors declare the components they contain and a flow specification. The flow specification defines the order in which the internal component AEs should be run. The internal AEs specified in an aggregate are also called the delegate analysis engines.
These _delegate engines_can be tightly coupled -running in the same process or loosely-coupled -running in separate processes or even on different machine as a remote service. The UIMA framework facilitates the deployment of AEs as remote service using an adapter layer that automatically creates the necessary infrastructure in response to a declaration in the components descriptors.

The Collection Processing Engine (CPE)is created by UIMA developers, it includes collections readers, AEs, Collection readers and other UIMA components tied together using a descriptor file.

The Collection Processing Manager is the execution engine of CPE.

Relationship to MONK