This work presents a requirement analysis and a design proposal for a general architecture for a specified, yet open set of human language technology (HLT) tasks --- the set chosen is dubbed information refinement. Apart from using information refinement as a means to focus the requirement analysis and accompanying design proposal, the analysis and proposal are based on a survey of a number of projects that have had great impact on the realisation of today's HLT architectures, as well as on the experiences gained from a long-term case study aiming at composing a general purpose tool-kit for Swedish. The analysis and design are currently used in an ongoing effort at SICS to implement an open and general architecture for information refinement.