Augmenting OCR

Augmenting OCR Working Group (A-OCR) Overview

This is a community derived encyclopedia of information about the Augmenting OCR working group and their efforts. Members of this working group and the community are encouraged to work together to develop content and deliverables that will serve the broader digitization community.

A-OCR Goals

We are focusing the efforts of the working group to put together materials to help the community get more from their OCR strategies. Topics we are gathering material on include:

• known effective practices for getting the most from any OCR software.
  
• known issues that hinder good (useful) OCR output.
  
• reporting findings after working with real image data and programmers to improve parsing of OCR output.
  
• lists of OCR software currently being utilized by the natural history collections community.
  

Working Group History

The Augmenting OCR working group formed from the first iDigBio Summit in 2011 out of a community consensus wish to attempt improving OCR output and algorithm tools to speed up the digitization process. Initial group members were suggested by those present at Summit 2011.

Our current working group met, in person, at a workshop in October 2012 to learn more about each other's use of OCR and OCR output, plan a February 2013 hackathon, develop content for our iSchools 2013 iConference workshop panel, and learn more about the latest developments in handwriting recognition. We are currently hard at work finalizing the hackathon and iConference13 plans.

OCR Related Materials

Check out the following pages. We welcome your input!

• OCR Resources
• Technical Issues
• OCR / NLP Workflows

Augmenting OCR Events, Outreach and Education

• Workshops
  • iDigBio Augmenting OCR Workshop - Our working group is meeting in Gainesville, Florida, October 1 - 2, 2012. We've put together an exciting and challenging meeting agenda.

• iSchools Conference 2013
  • The iDigBio AOCR working group successfully proposed a half-day workshop put together by members of our working group, see Help iDigBio Reveal Hidden Data: iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group Needs You!, February 12 in Fort Worth, Texas.

• Hackathon
  • Our working group is planning a Hackathon, concurrent with the above iSchools workshop to reach out beyond our natural history collections boarders for those with skills needed to improve and enhance our existing strategies for using OCR of images and parsing OCR output. The Hackathon is scheduled for February 13 - 14 at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT). Members of the natural history community will be invited to participate and a general call will go out to the broader community for interested applicants in early to mid November of 2013.
  • Application to Participate in the iDigBio 2013 Hackathon

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