The IMPACT project, coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands, focuses on improving access to text through an interoperability framework supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. It developed over 20 software components for historical document digitization, emphasizing usability, scalability, and integration capabilities, alongside an extensive dataset of over 600,000 images and 50,000 transcriptions. The project aims to provide a collaborative platform for researchers, streamline workflow management, and enhance processing through a community-driven ecosystem of tools and resources.

1. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
An Experimental Workflow Development
Platform for Historical Document Digitisation
Clemens Neudecker, KB National Library of the Netherlands

2. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Background
 IMPACT – Improving Access to Text (2008 – 2011)
From a technical perspective:
> 20 software components for solving specific issues
Prototyping new algorithms, improving commercial solutions
Different frameworks (C, C++, Java, etc.), platforms (Win/Linux)
+ 3rd party applications
“One ring to rule them all…”
 IMPACT Interoperability Framework (IIF)

3. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Main requirements
Behavioural:
 Minimize integration effort
 Minimize deployment effort
 Maximize usability
 Maximize scalability
Functional:
 Modular
 Transparent
 Expandable
 Open source
 Platform independent

4. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Framework integration
 Simple to use generic command line wrapper for web services

5. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Architecture
 IMPACT Interoperability Framework: Technologies
- Java
- Apache Maven
- Apache Tomcat
- Apache Axis2+Synapse
- Taverna Workflow Engine
 IMPACT Interoperability Framework: Dataset
- more than 600.000 images from digital libraries
- more than 50.000 ground truth transcriptions

6. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Generic Web Service Wrapper
Only requirement: Command Line Application  HTML form
Source code available on github:
https://github.com/impactcentre/toolwrapper
 Easy integration: developers can focus on their application
and have to worry less about integration =
higher quality software components

7. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Workflows
 OCR workflow =
data pipeline
 Building blocks =
processing modules
 Integration =
interaction between
nodes (mashups)
 Collaboration with

8. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

9. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Workflow management
 Web 2.0 style registry: myExperiment
 Local client: Taverna Workbench
 Web client: Project website

10. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Local client: Taverna Workbench
 Background:
BioSciences
 Developed and
maintained by
myGrid, UK
 Available for
Windows/Linux/OSX
and as open source
(Java)

11. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Web client: Taverna Server/
Workflow Parser
 SOAP/REST API
 Remote execution of workflows

12. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Community
 Web2.0 style workflow registry
 Community of experts
 Sharing of resources
 Knowledge exchange
 A central meeting point
for users and researchers

13. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Compute cluster
 Enterprise Service Bus
receives requests from
users and distributes
the load to the available
worker nodes
 Main effect:
Process parallelization,
Load distribution,
Fail over
 Test deployment on Dutch Supercomputing Cloud HPC

14. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Dataset
 Representative and annotated dataset of significant size, with
metadata, ground truth and search facilities

15. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Evaluation features
 Text based comparison of result with ground truth,
using Levenshtein distance method
 Layout based comparison of result with ground truth,
using the Page Analysis And Ground Truth Elements Framework
 Example:

16. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Outlook
 Online service for testing/evaluation/processing
Results Repository (WebDAV, POI)
 Extending the scope:
Workflows for linguistic analysis: CLARIN
Workflows for preservation: SCAPE
 Even better scalability: MapReduce/Hadoop
 Supported by a community of developers & practitioners

17. IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.
Summary
- Availability of resources (images, ground truth and tools)
to the international research community
- A common baseline for transparent evaluation and comparison
- Ready-to-use components, reproducible experiments
- Sharing of results and know-how
- Enable scalability for prototypes/data intensive workflows
- Simple and uniform user interface for all embedded tools
- Consolidation of support and maintenance
Thank you!
Questions?