A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for partial ingestion of content. The mechanism receives new content to be ingested into a corpus of information. The mechanism applies a plurality of sub-pipelines of annotation engines against the new content in order of effectiveness. The plurality of sub-pipelines include all annotation engines of an ingestion pipeline. Each sub-pipeline within the plurality of sub-pipelines generates one or more intermediate output objects. The mechanism provides access to the one or more intermediate output objects.