I'm nearing v1.0 on an imaging library application that utilizes SANE for aquisition. I'm writing it myself because I was unable to locate a similar application out there in the OSS world. My employer is funding my time to do so.
I'm writing to this list to gauge the interest of others in participating on this project. I intend to release it under GPL at some point, however before I put forth the effort to do so I'd like to know how much of a need there really is. I know that commercial packages of this sort are quite expensive. The app is a document library, catalog, & scanning workflow, conceived initially for digitizing invoices for an A/P department. It's entirely web-based, and is written in OO Perl. It allows an organization to set up multiple 'libraries', and scan documents into them using ADF-style scanners. Documents can be viewed, rotated, and downloaded in TIFF, PDF, or Jpeg formats. Documents are indexed with customizable meta-data (from data entry screens and/or links to external databases). Each library configuration has the ability to specify meta-data fields and even implement Perl hooks for customization, without impacting the base code or other libraries on the server. The scanning itself is network-based. Rather than use SANEd's network support, however, I have implemented a SOAP/RPC interface between the server and scanner host appliance(s). This way it is able to send compressed TIFs rather than raw image data. In a WAN environment, this bandwidth savings is great, and allows large documents to be imaged at remote offices and sent to a central server, without much impact on the WAN. I'm presently working on a mini-linux flash image for the scanner hosts, so that inexpensive terminal appliances can be used to 'network-enable' scanners. So: Is this something you'd use? Is this something you'd help improve? Thanks for any input. Feel free to send responses to me, I'll summarize to the list. Sebastian
