How to build a WebFountain: An architecture for very large-scale text analytics

WebFountain is a platform for very large-scale text analytics applications. The platform allows uniform access to a wide variety of sources, scalable system-managed deployment of a variety of document-level “augmenters” and corpus-level “miners,” and finally creation of an extensible set of hosted Web services containing information that drives end-user applications. Analytical components can be authored remotely by partners using a collection of Web service APIs (application programming interfaces). The system is operational and supports live customers. This paper surveys the high-level decisions made in creating such a system.