DocMining: A Cooperative Platform for Heterogeneous Document Interpretation According to User-Defined Scenarios

This paper describes the DocMining platform, that is aimed at providing a general framework for document interpretation. The platform integrates processings that come from different sources and that communicate through the document. A task to be performed is represented by a scenario that describes the processings to be run, and each processing is associated with a contract that describes the parameters, data and results of the processing as well as the way it has to be run. A controller interprets the scenario and triggers each required processing at its turn. The architecture of the platform is flexible enough to allow users to create their own objects, integrate their own processings into the platform, design their own interfaces and define their own scenarios. All data (documents, scenarios, contracts, etc.) are represented in XML, to facilitate data manipulation and communication inside the platform. After a brief state of the art in section 1, section 2 presents an overview of the DocMining platform and section 3 its implementation. The next sections deal with an example of a complete scenario, for the extraction of graphical and textual parts from a gray level image: Section 4 explains how the scenario is run and shows the results it provides, section 5 describes its construction.