Coordinated Promotion Initiative for the Further Development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Techniques

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Peter Burschel; Privatdozent Dr. Alexander Geyken; Barbara Schneider-Kempf; Dr. Rainer Stotzka
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: from 2018 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409784275

The aim of the coordinated promotion initiative is to describe procedures and develop guidelines in order to achieve an optimal workflow as well as a far-reaching standardization of OCR-related processes and metadata, and to prepare the conceptually complete transformation of the written German cultural heritage into a machine-readable form (structured full text). With this background, the project partners set up a coordination and support structure for projects in the second phase of the DFG's call for proposals (module project phase) in the first phase.According to the primary desideratum identified in the first phase of the project, it is necessary to fill the gap between research and practice. Accordingly, the coordinated promotion initiative sees its main task in supporting module projects, in particular in making the results of these projects available to a wide range of users in the simplest and most transparent form possible, thus significantly increasing the dissemination of the "new OCR world" that has developed over the past few years. The perspective of the initiative launched by the DFG to digitise the full text of the prints listed in the VDs is the availability of text and structural data that can be used scientifically in previously unattained dimensions. The work programme presented here represents the next step towards OCR 2.0.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)