Projet ANR-06-MDCA-0012 – Navidomass : NAVigation In DOcument MASSes
Programme : Programme "Masse de Données - Connaissances Ambiantes" (MDCA) 2006
Année de financement : 2006
Coordinateur du projet : UNIVERSITE DE LA ROCHELLE (UNIVERSITE DE LA ROCHELLE)
Partenaires : Inria Centre Nancy - Grand Est; Institut national des sciences appliquées de Rennes; Université de La Rochelle; Université Paris Descartes; Université de Rouen; Université François-Rabelais; Université François-Rabelais
Montant : 553356.0 euros
Date de début : 2007
Durée : 36 mois
Résumé : Contexte et motivation Contexte et motivation There is an increasing interest to digitally preserve and provide access to historical document collections residing in libraries, museums and archives. Such archives of old documents are a unique public asset, forming the collective and evolving memory of our societies. Indeed, ancient documents have a historical value not only for their physical appearance but also for their contents. Examples are unique manuscripts written by well known scientists, artists or writers; letters, trade forms or official documents that help to reconstruct historical sequences in a given place or time; artwork elements like stamps, illustrations, covers, etc. On the other hand, there is also a need of the preservation of the technical heritage belonging to companies or public institutions. Examples of that are old engineering drawings or cadastral maps. The challenge that is currently widespread in Europe is the conversion of such heritage to digital libraries that allow to preserve it but also to make it available worldwide using web-based portals. Citizens of the future should be able, through the medium of better designed digital libraries to gain access to a myriad of forms of knowledge from anywhere and at any time and in an efficient and user-friendly fashion. A number of initiatives exists focusing on the creation of large digital libraries worldwide reachable. Google is now running a project to create a global virtual library. A number of European libraries have started a joint similar project (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1566717,00.html). DELOS is an European Network of Excellence on digital libraries (http://www.delos.info/). The construction of such libraries has an additional and important challenge, the analysis of documents and the extraction of knowledge. Such goal requires efforts in designing and developing semantic-based systems to acquire, organize, share and use the knowledge embedded in documents. The field of Data Mining, combined with Document Analysis offers a robust methodological basis to perform tasks such as descriptive modeling (clustering and segmentation), classification, discovering patterns and rules or retrieval by content applied to document sources and databases. Old documents can be originals (paper, parchment etc.) or in image form (already scanned, possibly using now outdated technology). The key requirement is to be able to process these unique manuscripts, whether they are presented as free flowing text (treatises, novels, ...) or structured at different levels of physical-logical structure correspondence (letters, census lists, trade forms, ...). Degradation may be caused by a lifetime of use, and access must also be preserved to user annotations and corrections, stamps and unique artwork. Each class of document requires a different approach throughout the conversion process and lends itself to different levels of information extraction and description. In summary, the analysis of historical document knowledge to build metadata that is used to access to digital libraries. In the knowledge society, the interest is beyond the digitization of documents but to create semantically enriched digital libraries of such digitized documents. Enriched documents mean to add semantical annotations to digital images of the scanned documents. Such metadata is intended to describe, classify and index documents by their content. It would allow anywhere anytime natural access to such a cultural and scientific heritage. Thus, the main research goal of this project is to work in a collaborative framework on the Analysis of Old Documents. This goal consists in developing Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis techniques that allow extracting knowledge from documents and converting them to Digital Libraries containing the scanned pages enriched with semantical information. The partners groups of this project, Laboratoire Informatique, Image, Interaction - L3i (Universi