Hi Everyone,

     In my opinion, it is always better to OCR  the documents. I agree that it's error prone but there is a

Google Summer of Code project being done by AnkurIndia whose aim is to improve the quality of OCRs

for Indian scripts. https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2013/knoxxs/5001

So, maybe not immediately but in short time, OCR is worth it. I am not aware if any Wikisource in Indian

languages is as vast as French, English or Italian Wikisource. But we should have it because we have quite

a lot of text.

Thank You,

Aarti

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:28 PM, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur@gmail.com> wrote:

Whether to OCR or not to OCR is a significant issue! When we OCR a page of text, the resultant is often error-prone, lost formatting, and the correction requires crowd-sourced correction. Many of us know about Project Gutenberg. The site provides plain vanilla etexts. But what most people do not know that one of the very first crowd-sourcing initiatives - "Distributed Proof-readers" provides a huge volunteer community correcting OCR pages of text submitted to Project Gutenberg. In fact, I was a Distributed Proofreader before coming to Wikipedia and that was my first crowd-sourced experience.

http://www.pgdp.net/c/

I've also done digitisation in a government archive for five years. We took a conscious decision to OCR the text and allow the uncorrected layer to exist rather than take the pains to correct it. The material was used so infrequently, it made good sense for the end-user to proof-read himself should he desire to do so. So the real challenge in digitisation is not OCR, or rather, not just OCR but the creation of an error-free proof-read text layer behind the pdf/other formatted archive document.

Ashwin Baindur

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 08/19/2013 02:52 AM, L. Shyamal wrote:
> Re-posting a now outdated query from meta
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Access_To_Knowledge/Events/Bangalore/Digitization_workshop_18August2013
>
> now that the workshop has already been conducted I think those that have
> attended the workshop could comment if this cover Indic language OCR-ing -
> if it did it would be worthwhile if the OCR software used can be documented
> on the meta pages or elsewhere such as Wikisource. Most of the more
> experienced editors here will be fairly familiar with the use of scanners
> for creating PDF documents and uploading them to places like the Internet
> Archive but the experience or knowledge of OCRs and their success rates is
> a bit wanting for Indic languages (fonts).
>
> best wishes
> Shyamal
> en:User:Shyamal

I looked at the talk page on Meta - thank you, Shyamal!

For those who do not know: OCR means Optical Character Recognition.
When we want to get archival documents onto the web, it's nice to have
photos of them, but it's even better to OCR them so that people can
clearly read, copy, excerpt, translate, and remix the text.

Is there a central list of the problems that OCR software (especially
open source OCR software) has with text written in Indic languages?  If
so, I could help encourage people to fix those problems, as volunteers,
via a Google Summer of Code/Outreach Program for Women internship, via a
grant-funded project (such as https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG
), or via some other method.

People who would like to make Wikisource more easily useful for Indic
languages might want to contribute to the Wikisource vision development
project that's going on right now:

https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource_vision_development

The ProofreadPage extension (part of the Wikisource technology stack) is
being worked on right now in Aarti K. Dwivedi's Google Summer of Code
internship.  http://aartindi.blogspot.in/  She might be interested in
knowing about these issues, so I am cc'ing her.

Also - just because people on this list might be interested! - if you
have an old historical map that you'd like to vectorize to get it onto
OpenStreetMap, try out the new "Map polygon and feature extractor" tool:
https://github.com/NYPL/map-vectorizer

--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

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--
Warm regards,

Ashwin Baindur
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Aarti K. Dwivedi

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