IDigBio Augmenting OCR Workshop

Overview Augmenting OCR Workshop

First, we will be developing wiki content for the community on effective use of OCR and OCR output including collective examples of what our working group has learned does (and does not) work.

We'll also be learning about the latest in Biodiversity Informatics and OCR from our working group and invited guests. Our guest from Hannover, Germany and the Herbar Digital project is Karl-Heinz Steinke. Karl-Heinz' group has been working for the last 5 years on improving OCR algorithms for recognizing handwriting and on OCR algorithms in general as part of making digitization of herbarium specimens more efficient. See ]http://www.tdwg.org/proceedings/article/view/298 Feature recognition for herbarium specimens (Herbar-Digital)] to learn more about this project's work.

A Hackathon is on our list. We're set up to head for the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) in February of 2013 to make strides in just what OCR, ML and NLP can do to make our digitization efforts more efficient in producing data faster and producing data that's fit-for-use. We'll be choosing our hackathon focus and designing the hackathon together with the iDigBio IT Staff.

As part of our outreach efforts, we've set up participation in the upcoming iSchools Conference in Fort Worth, Texas where our working group is participating in three ways. We're submitting a poster, a notes paper, and hosting a half-day workshop to showcase our work and seek out potential collaborators. The iSchools theme is Data-Innovation-Wisdom which lines up perfectly with the goals of the ADBC, iDigBio and the TCNs. This conference is concurrent with our hackathon at BRIT.