From the webpage:
IBM Watson’s stellar performance in the Jeopardy! show captured the world’s imagination. The first real world application for Watson involves healthcare. How does Watson address issues that previous generations of tools have not been able to address? What are the technical approaches Watson takes to set it apart from other systems? This article answers how Watson takes on those questions and gives you a sneak peek of the technology behind Watson based on scientific papers, specifications, articles published by the IBM team, and interviews with university collaborators.
One of the things I find the most interesting about the Watson project is that Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) lies at its very core.
In part because I don’t think a significant part of all data is ever going to appear in structured format, whether that be Linked Data, some fuller/lesser form of RDF, Topic Maps or some other structured format. That being the case, we are going to have to deal with data as it presents itself and not the soft pitch form of say Linked Data.
That will include “merging” based on assumptions we impose on or derive from data and later verify or revise.
How skillful we are at building evolving systems with “memories” of past choices will determine how useful our systems are to users.
The article has a number of resources and pointers.