Antonacopoulos, A, Wiszniewski, B, Krawczyk, H and Karatzas, D 2004, The lifecycle of a digital historical document: structure and content , in: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng'04), 28-30 October 2004, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

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Abstract

This paper describes the lifecycle of a digital historical document, from template-based structure definition through to content extraction from the scanned pages and its final reconstitution as an electronic document (combining content and semantic information) along with the tools that have been created to realise each stage in the lifecycle. The whole approach is described in the context of different types of typewritten documents relating to prisoners in World-War II concentration camps and is the result of a multinational collaboration under the MEMORIAL project funded (€1.5M) by the European Union (www.memorialproject.info). Extensive tests with historians/archivists and evaluation of the content extraction results indicate the superior performance of the whole semantics-driven approach both over manual transcription and over the semi-automated application of off-the-shelf OCR and the use of a conventional (text and layout) document format.

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