A. Ghose et al. (Eds.): ICSOC 2012, LNCS 7759, pp. 72–84, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Kachako: A Hybrid-Cloud Unstructured Information Platform for Full Automation of Service Composition, Scalable Deployment and Evaluation Natural Language Processing as an Example Yoshinobu Kano PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Japan kano@kachako.org Abstract. Automation is the key concept when designing a service platform, because automation could reduce human’s work. Focusing on unstructured infor- mation such as text, image and audio, we implemented our service platform “Kachako” in a hybrid-cloud way where services themselves are transferred on demand. We suggest making each service specified by its input and output types, and executable of the service portable, compatible and interoperable. Assuming such services, Kachako thoroughly automates everything that users need. Kacha- ko provides graphical user interfaces allowing end users to complete their tasks within Kachako without programming. Kachako is designed in a modular way by complying with well-known frameworks such as UIMA, Hadoop and Maven, al- lowing partial reuse or customization. We showed that Kachako is practically use- ful by integrating our natural language processing (NLP) services. Kachako is the world first full automation system for NLP freely available. Keywords: Automation, Unstructured Information, Service Composition, Sca- lability, Natural Language Processing. 1 Introduction One of the primary motivations providing services would be to save users’ labor, i.e. automation. However, do current services sufficiently provide automation features? If we could thoroughly automate users’ service related tasks, what remains as human’s task? What do we need to achieve such automation? Our answer is that the minimum user operations include only two steps: prepare a user account in machines, and specify a service that the user wishes to run. The rest of everything could be automated if we provide an ideal service platform. That said, unfortunately, existing service platforms tend to ask users too many manual tasks that could be potentially automated. An advantage of web services would be the easiness of using services. However, web services, from users’ point of view, have more or less fixed configurations both as software and hardware; services are under control of service providers, so