In this chapter, the authors present Service Oriented Data Acquisition (SODA), a service-deployable open-source platform for retrieving and dynamically aggregating information extraction and knowledge acquisition software components. The motivation in creating such a system came from the observed gap between the large availability of Information Analysis components for different frameworks (such as UIMA [Ferrucci & Lally, 2004] and GATE [Cunningham, Maynard, Bontcheva, & Tablan, 2002]) and the difficulties in discovering, retrieving, integrating these components, and embedding them into software systems for knowledge feeding. By analyzing the research area, the authors noticed that there are a few solutions for this problem, though they all lack in assuring a great level of platform independence, collaboration, flexibility, and most of all, openness. The solution that they propose is targeted to different kinds of users, from application developers, benefiting from a semantic repository of inter-connectable information extraction and ontology feeding components, to final users, who can plug and play these components through SODA compliant clients.
SODA
