On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 09:36:11AM +0000, Robin Taylor wrote: > 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.
Most common formats other than plain text have some sort of tagging feature. In some cases, few know about them so they aren't much used. That could be fixed easily. > 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. The older Office formats are readable programmatically too. More readable, actually, since OOXML is very new, still only partially documented, and not implemented anywhere, even at Microsoft. There's a store for document attributes inside the traditional Office format's bag. There's a nice Java library (POI) that can extract them. But then that only works for MS Office documents. Not for OpenOffice or Symphony. Not for Acrobat. We have tens of thousands of PDFs. We have audio and video streams waiting in the wings. And we still need a system for assigning meanings to the tags. > 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. See the subject line. If everybody makes up his own tags then there is no standard, and software cannot make use of the tags without being told, for each individual provider's profile, what to look for and what they mean. Bibliographic software like EndNote shows us what we wind up with: hundreds of format modules to be maintained. We can do that but I'd rather have something systematic. (BTW EndNote or one of its brethren might be able to serve the original request.) If there is no standard now, then maybe it's up to the document repository community (that's us) to lay the groundwork for some standardization and champion the idea until it's accepted. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
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