Optical Character Recognition and Its Use in Various Forms of Information Retrieval

Very large amounts of genuinely useful data remain locked in analog only format. Books, magazines, newspapers and even filing cabinets contain something like 80% to 90 % of all known useful information1 and these data are only slowly being made available in digital format. The purpose of this missive is to discuss practical analog to digital domain conversion via optical character recognition and use of such converted data in the digital domain. Note that we are concerned only with the manufacturing process, e.g. the conversion of the data, and not the retrieval of data per se, however, how we make the data available to the data store dramatically influences the options that the database operation has.