I was not aware of either the XPort or Rabbit options - at $40 to $60, those really open up some low-cost applications that are not in the range of $200-500 SBCs such as the Axis boards.
Is there anything similar for wireless 802.11, for less than a hundred bucks and with a power draw of less than 5W ? That is to say, a small board or chip with the functionality of the XPort or Rabbit, but in a wireless version? I know that AMD has the Alchemy boards, but my impression is that these are several hundred dollars. And you could always add a wireless PCI card to a Mini-Itx board, but that is at least $200, with power consumption in the range of 20-30W compared to the Xport, which draws less than 1 W.
1) Law Firm - each document is indexed by type of case (e.g. tax, property, litigation), client number, client type, federal vs. state vs. local, etc. That way other lawyers in the firm can search for similar cases and "re-use" existing work. I know for a fact that this is a widely used scenario in law firms.
2) Insurance company - each paper claim is scanned and stored, indexing by customer id, type of claim, etc.
If you don't believe this is a big market, check out AIIM, the industry association for this type of software.
You would be surprised - a lot of law firms and consulting firms actually require that employees save their files in a document management system (FileNet, DocsOpen, etc.) If you make such behavior required and say "all information belongs to the company", people will generally comply.
ALICE is a great tool for teaching Python programming to kids via object-oriented 3D animation. I used it to teach a week-long computer camp for 11-12 year olds here in New York, and was amazed at how quickly the kids took to the tool and were motivated by it. It's free, but unfortunately it's for Windows only.
From the site,
Alice v2.0b is the next major version of the Alice 3D Authoring system, from the Stage3 Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been completely rewritten from scratch over the last two years.
The focus of the Alice project is now to provide the best possible first exposure to programming for students ranging from middle schoolers to college students.
I don't really understand the full scope of your "ethical dilemma":
1) It's NOT the US Postal Service - it is company email to be used for company business.
2) Most corporate email servers (Exchange, Notes) have a built-in functionality to remove a damaging or sensitive message (and it's reasonably easy, since they store the message ONCE in a database and link it to the multiple recipients). A friend who works at a big law firm recently had this happen - a secretary accidentally released a sensitive personnel memo to the entire firm, and the IT personnel activated this feature to quickly remove it (but not before a bunch of people printed it, forwarded it to their hotmail accounts, etc.).
Last time I checked, DVDRAMs were about $10 per 9.4 GB, or $1/GB. Interestingly, that's the same price per GB you now pay for 5400 RPM IDE drives - about $90 for 80 GB, or slightly more for 7200 RPM drives (about $1.40 per GB). Just build a big server with 3ware raid cards and stick it in another building on campus.
These people did this a while ago - instead of spending $4000 on a piece of specialized hardware that is officially Windows-only, buy a $2000 server and plenty of drives, with room to scale to over 4 TB:)
I live in Brooklyn, NY and was very excited when we finally got ZipCar in our neighborhood a few months ago. But I was really put off by the fine print in the signup that basically said "You have to give us a $200 deposit to join zipcar. If you ever leave, we'll give it back to you, but you should realize that it is mixed in with other Zipcar corporate funds in several accounts, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to receive your deposit if Zipcar ever goes out of business"
What a "nice" revenue model they have! More like a pyramid scheme - get $200 (or at least six month's revenue for the average Zipcar user) every time a new person signs up, and then use that money to expand the business rapidly. If and when they go belly-up, you'll be waiting in line with VW and every other creditor trying to get your $200 back.
I was hoping to use Zipcar at least once a month, but I don't want to risk losing my $200 just to try it out. Maybe when other competitors come to NYC they will change the policy?
I was recently involved in an implementation similar to this one, and there are a number of factors that might/might not make it worthwhile for you to use OCR:
1) What's the daily/weekly volume of forms/pages? If it's really only a few hundred or even several thousand pages per week, it may not be worth it. In my project, we had several deadlines where we had to turn around ten thousand forms (5-8 pages each) in 3 days - using OCR to increase the throughput quickly became cheaper than hiring temps to do data entry.
2) What kind of data are you collecting? As several others have mentioned, form UI design is intimately connected with the type of data you need and the quality tolerances for the data. If most of the questions can be answered in checkboxes, then OCR is a good bet and will probably save you some time. Actually the vendors refer to OMR (object mark recognition, or checkboxes/bubbles), OCR, and ICR (intelligent character recognition, usually handprint). OMR accuracy is >99%, OCR is something like 95-99% given a good font, and ICR is somewhat less. We had great success with OMR/checkboxes, but ICR recognition of handprinted address data, free response questions, etc. was quite poor. Even if each form contains a mixture of checkboxes and free response questions, it may be worth it to implement an OCR-type solution because "heads-up" data entry of the free response questions is quicker than having to look down at a stack of papers and leaf through them.
3) Are the forms already designed and printed, or do you have some freedom in working with designers to adapt them for OCR use? Using an OCR solution has the side benefit of forcing you to be really careful about how you ask questions and how you lay out the form - in other words, it really forces you to constrain certain lines and boxes, making things that much more explicit for the user. We went through 6 or 7 revisions of one of our forms before we found a format that didn't confuse anyone. I've got to think that many times human data entry operators don't bother to type in the extra notes/margin comments/etc. on manually entered forms.
4) How many sites are there? In our case, we had 1 site where all of the forms were mailed. We had a dedicated form processing area with 5 big workstations, $30K of software (we used ReadSoft, more on that later), and $15-20K for three medium-sized Kodak scanners. The workflow is basically scan-->perform OCR/ICR/OMR recognition -->manually validate any fields that were not recognized --> write to a flat file or write directly to database using ODBC.
SCAN - If you have lots of sites, paying $2-3K for a low-end duplex scanner for each site may not be realistic. I'm increasingly interested in the low-end HP printer/scanner machines, as these allow you to scan to a network location or email (starting at about $700).
RECOGNITION - ideally this would happen in one location, because you're generally paying the bulk of the license fee for this.
VALIDATION - both ReadSoft (http://www.readsoft.net) and Captiva (http://www.captivacorp.com) claim to support both fat/proprietary and web-based clients for the validation by data entry people. I've never tested the web clients, but that might be a real selling point.
UPLOAD - we wrote the data to a flat file and then used a perl script to post each line of data to a JSP form - so each form was available both on the web and on paper - this turned out to be quite nice. As far as vendors, ReadSoft and Captiva both seem to be pretty strong. Cardiff Teleforms is another decent product, although they have an integrated form-builder that is pretty limiting, compared to Readsoft's ability to adapt to pre-existing paper forms.
I looked long and hard at sourceforge and elsewhere, and though there are some OCR projects, there doesn't seem to be anything focused on form processing. Given the progress on the XForms standard and an alpha implementation of it in the development build of Cocoon, I'd love to see a project get started to build a forms OCR project into Cocoon. Anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I was not aware of either the XPort or Rabbit options - at $40 to $60, those really open up some low-cost applications that are not in the range of $200-500 SBCs such as the Axis boards.
Is there anything similar for wireless 802.11, for less than a hundred bucks and with a power draw of less than 5W ? That is to say, a small board or chip with the functionality of the XPort or Rabbit, but in a wireless version? I know that AMD has the Alchemy boards, but my impression is that these are several hundred dollars. And you could always add a wireless PCI card to a Mini-Itx board, but that is at least $200, with power consumption in the range of 20-30W compared to the Xport, which draws less than 1 W.
1) Law Firm - each document is indexed by type of case (e.g. tax, property, litigation), client number, client type, federal vs. state vs. local, etc. That way other lawyers in the firm can search for similar cases and "re-use" existing work. I know for a fact that this is a widely used scenario in law firms.
2) Insurance company - each paper claim is scanned and stored, indexing by customer id, type of claim, etc.
If you don't believe this is a big market, check out AIIM, the industry association for this type of software.
You would be surprised - a lot of law firms and consulting firms actually require that employees save their files in a document management system (FileNet, DocsOpen, etc.) If you make such behavior required and say "all information belongs to the company", people will generally comply.
Which tapes are you talking about?
I just checked on CDW - correct me if I'm wrong:
1) DLTs are about $2/GB of native capacity - $30-35 for 15GB.
2) DDS3s are about $0.85/GB of native capacity - $10 for 12GB.
3) Ultriums are about $0.80/GB of native capacity - $80 for 100 GB.
Are my numbers wrong here? Given that some IDE drives are now right at $1/GB, I'm not sure that the tape argument will hold true in the long run.
I don't really understand the full scope of your "ethical dilemma":
1) It's NOT the US Postal Service - it is company email to be used for company business.
2) Most corporate email servers (Exchange, Notes) have a built-in functionality to remove a damaging or sensitive message (and it's reasonably easy, since they store the message ONCE in a database and link it to the multiple recipients). A friend who works at a big law firm recently had this happen - a secretary accidentally released a sensitive personnel memo to the entire firm, and the IT personnel activated this feature to quickly remove it (but not before a bunch of people printed it, forwarded it to their hotmail accounts, etc.).
Last time I checked, DVDRAMs were about $10 per 9.4 GB, or $1/GB. Interestingly, that's the same price per GB you now pay for 5400 RPM IDE drives - about $90 for 80 GB, or slightly more for 7200 RPM drives (about $1.40 per GB). Just build a big server with 3ware raid cards and stick it in another building on campus.
:)
http://staff.sdsc.edu/its/terafile/index.html
These people did this a while ago - instead of spending $4000 on a piece of specialized hardware that is officially Windows-only, buy a $2000 server and plenty of drives, with room to scale to over 4 TB
I live in Brooklyn, NY and was very excited when we finally got ZipCar in our neighborhood a few months ago. But I was really put off by the fine print in the signup that basically said "You have to give us a $200 deposit to join zipcar. If you ever leave, we'll give it back to you, but you should realize that it is mixed in with other Zipcar corporate funds in several accounts, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to receive your deposit if Zipcar ever goes out of business"
What a "nice" revenue model they have! More like a pyramid scheme - get $200 (or at least six month's revenue for the average Zipcar user) every time a new person signs up, and then use that money to expand the business rapidly. If and when they go belly-up, you'll be waiting in line with VW and every other creditor trying to get your $200 back.
I was hoping to use Zipcar at least once a month, but I don't want to risk losing my $200 just to try it out. Maybe when other competitors come to NYC they will change the policy?
1) What's the daily/weekly volume of forms/pages? If it's really only a few hundred or even several thousand pages per week, it may not be worth it. In my project, we had several deadlines where we had to turn around ten thousand forms (5-8 pages each) in 3 days - using OCR to increase the throughput quickly became cheaper than hiring temps to do data entry.
2) What kind of data are you collecting? As several others have mentioned, form UI design is intimately connected with the type of data you need and the quality tolerances for the data. If most of the questions can be answered in checkboxes, then OCR is a good bet and will probably save you some time. Actually the vendors refer to OMR (object mark recognition, or checkboxes/bubbles), OCR, and ICR (intelligent character recognition, usually handprint). OMR accuracy is >99%, OCR is something like 95-99% given a good font, and ICR is somewhat less. We had great success with OMR/checkboxes, but ICR recognition of handprinted address data, free response questions, etc. was quite poor. Even if each form contains a mixture of checkboxes and free response questions, it may be worth it to implement an OCR-type solution because "heads-up" data entry of the free response questions is quicker than having to look down at a stack of papers and leaf through them.
3) Are the forms already designed and printed, or do you have some freedom in working with designers to adapt them for OCR use? Using an OCR solution has the side benefit of forcing you to be really careful about how you ask questions and how you lay out the form - in other words, it really forces you to constrain certain lines and boxes, making things that much more explicit for the user. We went through 6 or 7 revisions of one of our forms before we found a format that didn't confuse anyone. I've got to think that many times human data entry operators don't bother to type in the extra notes/margin comments/etc. on manually entered forms.
4) How many sites are there? In our case, we had 1 site where all of the forms were mailed. We had a dedicated form processing area with 5 big workstations, $30K of software (we used ReadSoft, more on that later), and $15-20K for three medium-sized Kodak scanners. The workflow is basically scan-->perform OCR/ICR/OMR recognition -->manually validate any fields that were not recognized --> write to a flat file or write directly to database using ODBC.
SCAN - If you have lots of sites, paying $2-3K for a low-end duplex scanner for each site may not be realistic. I'm increasingly interested in the low-end HP printer/scanner machines, as these allow you to scan to a network location or email (starting at about $700).
RECOGNITION - ideally this would happen in one location, because you're generally paying the bulk of the license fee for this.
VALIDATION - both ReadSoft (http://www.readsoft.net) and Captiva (http://www.captivacorp.com) claim to support both fat/proprietary and web-based clients for the validation by data entry people. I've never tested the web clients, but that might be a real selling point.
UPLOAD - we wrote the data to a flat file and then used a perl script to post each line of data to a JSP form - so each form was available both on the web and on paper - this turned out to be quite nice.
As far as vendors, ReadSoft and Captiva both seem to be pretty strong. Cardiff Teleforms is another decent product, although they have an integrated form-builder that is pretty limiting, compared to Readsoft's ability to adapt to pre-existing paper forms.
I looked long and hard at sourceforge and elsewhere, and though there are some OCR projects, there doesn't seem to be anything focused on form processing. Given the progress on the XForms standard and an alpha implementation of it in the development build of Cocoon, I'd love to see a project get started to build a forms OCR project into Cocoon. Anyone?