Text analytics and data access as services - A case study in transforming a legacy client-server text analytics workbench and framework to SOA

As business information is made available via the intranet and Internet, there is a growing need to quickly analyze the resulting mountain of information to infer business insights. For instance, analyzing a company's patent database against another's to find the patents that are cross-licensable. IBM Research's Business Insight Workbench (BIW) is a text mining and analytics tool that allows end-users to explore, understand, and analyze business information in order to come up with such insight. However, the first incarnation of BIW used a thick-client architecture with a database back-end. While very successful, the architecture caused limitations in the tool's flexibility, scalability, and deployment. In this paper we discuss our initial experiences in converting BIW into a modem Service-Oriented Architecture. We also provide some insights into our design choices and also outline some lessons learned.