Creating Digital Resources from Legacy Documents: An Experience Report from the Biosystematics Domain

  • Authors:
  • Guido Sautter;Klemens Böhm;Donat Agosti;Christiana Klingenberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Karlsruhe 76128;Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Karlsruhe 76128;Am. Mus. of Nat. Hist., New York NY 10024-5192;Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde, Karlsruhe, 76133

  • Venue:
  • ESWC 2009 Heraklion Proceedings of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference on The Semantic Web: Research and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Digitized legacy document marked up with XML can be used in many ways, e.g., to generate RDF statements about the world described. A prerequisite for doing so is that the document markup is of sufficient quality. Since fully automated markup-generation methods cannot ensure this, manual corrections and cleaning are indispensable. In this paper, we report on our experiences from a digitization and markup project for a large corpus of legacy documents from the biosystematics domain, with a focus on the use of modern tools. The markup created covers both document structure and semantic details. In contrast to previous markup projects reported on in literature, our corpus consists of large publications that comprise many different semantic units, and the documents contain OCR noise and layout artifacts. A core insight is that digitization and automated markup on the one hand and manual cleaning and correction on the other hand should be tightly interleaved, and that tools supporting this integration yield a significant improvement.