I think it is important for non-technical readers of this list to separate
the 2 issues in the discussion.
1) OCR-Integration
This is something WMF can help with, because they can make the connection
between an OCR service and Mediawiki easier and automate certain steps.
2) OCR
WMF is not programming an OCR-software and it would probably be a bad idea
to reinvent the wheel. It would be far better if editors reached out to
existing ORC-software projects. Starting a discussion or filing a bug is an
important first step in improving the situation.
Tesseract-OCR (
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr) for example is an
open-source project that works on OCR (No bugs filed for e.g. Bengali). The
mailing list (
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tesseract-ocr)
contains discussions about e.g. Bengali (
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tesseract-ocr/Bengali). So I
think the situation might not be good, but is certainly on its way of
getting better.
Maybe WMF-India can fund a developer to work on Tesseract-OCR. Another idea
would be, to reach out to local universities. Maybe a few
informatics-students can improve the situation.
-Tobias
2015-12-01 19:51 GMT+01:00 ViswaPrabha (വിശ്വപ്രഭ) <viswaprabha(a)gmail.com>om>:
From that page which, Alex has linked:
"On the other hand, using the service for converting document formats *is*
SaaSS, because it's something you could have done by running a suitable
program (free, one hopes) in your own computer."
Hundreds among us have burnt their hands in developing a successful 'free'
OCR tool for Indic languages without any real luck until now.
Until such a tool appears on the horizon, the Google facility is just okay
to be used.
Especially so, because we are anyway dealing with 'free' input and output
material.
-Viswaprabha
On 1 December 2015 at 21:49, Bodhisattwa Mandal <
bodhisattwa.rgkmc(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Alex,
Of course, building free OCR can be the only permanent solution, but WMF
is not interested in building new OCR right now. The language engineering
team said at the conference that, they don't have the infrastructure and
expertise to build such software. That's why, we have to rely on Google
OCR, knowing very well about its profit making intentions. It's just a
temporary solution but right now, its the only best possible alternative
for us.
Regards
Bodhisattwa
On 1 Dec 2015 21:12, "Alex Brollo" <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
... nevertheless I found very interesting this
about "SaaSS":
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
So, to build a true, excellent and indipendent "wikisource multilingual
OCR service" would be a better solution.
Alex
2015-12-01 16:06 GMT+01:00 Bodhisattwa Mandal <
bodhisattwa.rgkmc(a)gmail.com>gt;:
Hi Nemo,
Thanks for your interest. You can find the list of Google OCR supported
languages in the following link -
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?hl=en
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
Thanks for posting about the topic. Which indic languages are we
talking about exactly? Are they included in the recent FineReader versions
now used by Internet Archive?
Nemo
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