Silicon Valley Musings

As small businesses attempt to gain efficiency through automation,
they usually start by moving their back office processes to digital,
computer-based systems. Before a business takes the next step and
converts their entire workflow to a digital format, there is a period
when paper based forms are entered into the back office systems by
hand. This is a labor intensive, error prone procedure.

Providing a free online service that allows small businesses to submit
digitized images of their business forms and have them translated to
structured data using state of the art recognition software would
eliminate this costly step.

The inputs to this service would be an image file, a return address,
and a desired return transport (http, email, SOAP, etc.).
Optional inputs could include hints as to what form template was used,
the desired XML schema for the results, and an XSL translation if
necessary.

The output would be an XML document containing the recognized data
from the scanned form, and optionally the original image file.

I am aware of two enterprise-level document recognition systems that
could be used for this service: Verity’s Intelligent Capital
Management Product Suite including Teleform, LiquidOffice,
LiquidCapture, and MediClaim, and Adobe’s Document Services including
Adobe Barcoded Paper Forms Solution. I did a feature review of these
products about two years ago and as I recall Verity’s (then Cardiff’s)
product was more comprehensive.