Integration of Kitodo and OCR-D for Productive Mass-Digitisation

Implementation Project Kitodo / OCR-D

• 8 man-years, 2 years, 3 libraries:
  • Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden
  • Universitätsbibliothek der TU Braunschweig
  • Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim
• integrate Kitodo with OCR-D "backend" as distributed system
• extend both OCR-D and Kitodo for robust mass production

Premises

• Kitodo: Workflow Management System for libraries

  • Open-source, community-driven
  • Modules:
    • Kitodo.Production (digitisation workflows)
    • Kitodo.Presentation (DFG viewer etc.)
  • OCR: only via commercial plugins (black box, license costs)

• OCR-D: operative single-workstation command-line prototype

  • no network interfaces for distribution/scaling yet
  • no error recovery and dynamic workflow execution yet
  • no result quality estimation and runtime evaluation yet
  • no assisted/automatic workflow configuration yet

Goals

1. Implement OCR-D as Web-based distributed system

   • controller + processing servers
   • container virtualisation

2. Develop quality based workflow optimisation for OCR-D

   • automatic quality estimation of results
   • dynamic workflows with quality thresholds and switches
   • predefined, manually optimised workflow configurations

3. Implement OCR-D as OCR module in Kitodo.Production

   • manage data and run workflows
   • track and visualise result progress/quality
   • edit and manage workflow configurations

4. Extend Kitodo.Presentation and DFG Viewer

   • user evaluation of results, versioning
   • user prioritisation of OCR tasks (On-Demand OCR)