I don't think it's a daft question at all, but then I am known to ask some very daft ones myself :)
I think the problem is that we wrap the data up in formats that make extraction difficult and then need to go to great lengths to try and extract that data. I don't know of any widely used, reliable methos as yet. Better to move towards formats that make extraction easy. Microsoft docx documents looks like a step in the right direction to me. It's a normal Word document but is stored as xml and hence is readable programatically. In addition the author can add their own tags, so there is no reason why they should not tag the abstract, references, etc. In theory it should be easy to then extract that information. I'm sure there are good reasons why we all favour pdf's but I think the principle still applies. Cheers, Robin. Robin Taylor Main Library University of Edinburgh Tel. 0131 6515208 > -----Original Message----- > From: Andrew Marlow [mailto:marlow.and...@googlemail.com] > Sent: 13 December 2008 23:53 > To: dspace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: [Dspace-tech] standards to facilitate metadata > extraction duringtext extraction > > This may seem like a crazy or naive question, but is there > any standard laid down by publishers or societies that > authors must adhere to so that the extraction of metadata > from articles can be easily automated? Having just performed > a text extraction on a non-searchable PDF I see that there is > no easy way to get any metadata out. But if a society had > conventions for the layour of the article, specifying > location and format of title, authors, abstract, bibliography > etc, then it might be possible. I have seen a very regular > visual layout in the PDFs from some places. Using OCR > techniques it might be possible to locate blocks of interest. > It might also be possible from a text extraction but that > might be harder since all visual layout information is gone > (at least it was with the tool I used). I wonder if this is > being considered by anyone. I am very new to this area so > please excuse me if this seems like a silly question. > -- > Regards, > > Andrew M. > > -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SF.Net email is Sponsored by MIX09, March 18-20, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The future of the web can't happen without you. Join us at MIX09 to help pave the way to the Next Web now. Learn more and register at http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;208669438;13503038;i?http://2009.visitmix.com/ _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list DSpace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
