topic Re: How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco in Alfresco Forum

How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco

kellerclark — Thu, 31 May 2018 23:18:52 GMT

We are new to Alfresco Community. When we scan paper documents they are automatically OCR'ed and we are given the option to change the filename to our chosen naming convention. We then drag and drop the file into Alfresco. This works very well!When our users have digital files they want to drag an

Re: How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco

calvo — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 07:52:04 GMT

Hi,

In my case, something similar to this behaviour, docs were scanned, ocr'ed and saved in a particular folder on filesystem structure (shared folder). Over that folder I had an application checking to extract metadata, change name of files and afterwards upload -using CMIS- the file to Alfresco.

In Alfresco this documents were classified using content rules and scripts depending on filename and metadata.

So, maybe you can try to develop an external application to do all funcionality you need, before upload the file to Alfresco using CMIS.

Regards,

clv

Re: How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco

mehe — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:08:03 GMT

...there are so many possibilities.. 🙂

do you use only one scanner or a bunch of?

do you upload to a specific "inBox" or everywhere in Alfresco?

What OCR Software/Scanner are you using? Maybe it has a kind of "scripting" possibility or an api to add some code?

The simplest approach for me is:

- use a scanner with OCR-facility
- upload the scanned documents to a "inBox" folder (using a "post-scan" script

- in Alfresco: check naming convention and "is there text to extract" via "created" rule in "inBox"

- in Alfresco: move document to a folder, depending on naming convention (or raise an exception/move to an error folder in rule, if naming isn't valid or no text could be extracted

Re: How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco

kellerclark — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 15:57:32 GMT

Thank you! That is very helpful. I will look into CMIS, scripts and creating rules. That sounds like it may just be the ticket.

Paper that we scan goes smoothly into Alfresco.

It is the files, on users computers, that they drop into the system that are causing problems. They assume that since it is a PDF it has been OCR'ed. This may or may not be the case. If we get a bunch of unsearchable documents into our system, users will not be able to find them later and the value of the EDMS breaks down.

Short of threatening them, how can we set it up so that only OCR'ed documents go into the system?

Re: How to automate OCR prior to uploading to Alfresco

jpotts — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 17:45:07 GMT

If your OCR step can also set a property, that's probably easiest. Then you can have a rule check for the presence of that property.

Alternatively, the rule could do a transform to text. If the result is empty you know it wasn't OCR'd so you move the document to an exception folder or send an email or something.