After lunch, the participants of the IMPACT Project Outcomes Event split up into two groups. While one group stayed in the Auditorium to hear more about the library experiences of the project, a group of distinguished experts in the fields of OCR, language technology and digital humanities, together with the reviewers and EC project officer of the IMPACT project, was invited to meet with the tool developers in IMPACT and try out several IMPACT tools.
The workshop was chaired by Clemens Neudecker, the technical project leader of IMPACT. The IMPACT tools were demonstrated at different tables in the room and included the ABBYY FineReader Engine (ABBYY), Adaptive OCR engine with CONCERT Collaborative Correction Platform (IBM), Functional Extension Parser (University of Innsbruck), IMPACT Repository, Aletheia, Layout Evaluation, Text line & word segmentation and Correction of arbitrary warping (University of Salford), Image enhancement tools, OCR evaluation toolkit and Word spotting engine (NCSR), Post-correction tool with text and error profiler (University of Munich), Tools for Lexicon Building, OCR with historical lexica and Retrieval (INL) and the IMPACT interoperability framework (KB).
A full overview of tools presented is available here.
Both the tool providers and the invited experts embraced the opportunity to play with the IMPACT tools, discuss in-depth current and future research plans, and generally exchange experience and ideas. The fruitful and inspiring atmosphere even continued well beyond the original four hours allocated to the workshop, and only after 17.30 everyone could be persuaded to continue their talks during the drinks reception and the joint dinner in the evening.
The group of experts consisted of:
- Marco Bachler (University of Leipzig)
- Horst Bunke (University of Bern)
- David Doermann (University of Maryland)
- Tatiana Gornostay (Tilde)
- Marian Hellema (KB National Library of the Netherlands)
- Steve Knight (National Digital Heritage Archive at the National Library of New Zealand)
- Josep Llados (Computer Vision Centre, Autonomous University of Barcelona)
- Volker Margner (Technichal University Braunschweig)
- Laura Mandell (Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University)
- Simone Marinai (University of Florence)
- Liina Munari (European Commission Project Officer)
- Thierry Paquet (University of Rouen)
- Carolina Santamarina de la Varga (Unidad de Recursos de información Científica para la Investigaciónn del CSIC)
- Thomas Stacker (Wolfenbattel Digital Library)