NomenclatorZoologicus

[David Remsen]

Rich  - We are working on a web-based interface for online review now.
  We would certainly appreciate any input you or others might have.  Our
idea is, as you suggested, to have the page image visible along with
the editable data record.  We are playing with image manipulation
functions in php to dynamically/interactively crop and navigate the
page image so that the current record is at the top of the image just
under the converted data record.  One of the most physically exhausting
exercises in reviewing these data is moving the eye between the page
and the record, particularly in alphabetical lists where the first
characters are identical.  Compound this with the fact that much of the
record consists of abbreviations and non-text words that require a lot
of this back and forth motion.  We are going to be actively working on
these issues in the next couple of weeks and will likely try out
several ideas or offer several options before we get operational.


> As for eliminating the need for the second of these, I think the best
> way to
> achieve this would be to develop a dead-simple web-based
> user-interface that
> allows an online reviewer to easily go page-by-page, line-by-line, and
> see
> the electronic version directly next to the original scanned version
> (ideally with the electronic version formatted with the same font,
> etc. as
> the printed version, so discrepancies are more obvious); and a simple
> way
> for the reviewer to make the necessary adjustments right there on the
> web
> page, then click a "Submit" button to go to the next name.  Dave --
> I've got
> a number of ideas & suggestions, if you're interested (although I
> suspect
> that you're already WAY ahead of me on this).




> P.S. Dave -- out of curiosity, have you tried Adobe's Acrobat Capture
> 3.0
> software? It's their industrial-strength OCR product, which has
> impressive
> tools for collaborative scanning/OCRing/proofing of printed documents.
> Was
> this among the tools you tried when determining that in-house OCRing
> was not
> feasible?


We tried this and several other OCR tools prior to out-sourcing to a
data conversion company.  We had volumes 1-9 professionally unbound so
that the page feeds would go smoothly.    Our library has several
high-end scanner/copiers that bundle scanning and OCR together and the
resultant conversion was a good 99% accurate but unfortunately this was
not good enough.  99% gives an error approximately every 2 records.
We also tried a different OCR package and then wrote some scripts to
compare the two records hoping that they would narrow the mistakes down
by disagreeing on the errors and agreeing on the successfully converted
works.  This is the approach used at the NLM for some of the Turning
the Pages conversions they have done where they actually use something
like 5 different OCR packages and then sort through the results for an
editorial pass.  It might be worth chatting with them sometime on this
methodology.  Our two-pass effort, however,  created more problems than
it solved.

It's interesting to note that the conversion service we chose that
purported to do double-keying actually initially used OCR tools as
well.  I had been told that these guys had some 'tricks' for
high-accuracy OCR where they use double-keying only sporadically to
check the OCR.   While this might work for some text it didn't work for
NZ where everything is abbreviated, punctuated, and very few of the
strings are actual words.  We went through 4 different iterations with
the company before they threw there hands up and actually had it
double-keyed.  The fifth pass was the one we kept. They never actually
admitted they used OCR but the errors I found were consistent with OCR
and not typographical errors. (things like an 198o instead of 1980 or
l980 instead of 1980).  So I think future efforts should keep this in
mind.   We will summarize this and additional tips and tools that we
have developed for parsing and QC-ing large volumes of nomenclatural
text like this on the NZ site.

David Remsen