Search, Tika and Document Processing, and interview with the guru

Welcome to a special edition of The Data Science Dossier. This edition covers Search, PDFs, Document Processing and Apache Tika.

Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Allison, Document Processing guru and lover of all things PDF. We had a great chat about how he got into document processing, his involvement with the Apache Software Foundation and where he sees Search going in the future with the advent of LLMs. To see the whole interview, click on the YouTube video below.

From the community

For anyone who doesn't know what Apache Tika is, Tika is an open-sourced document processing engine that can input just about any document, image, etc., and process the hidden metadata and textual content within the document. Written in Java, it has a Python wrapper, rest interface and more, which means you can deploy it in many different environments, regardless of your chosen operating system. It also has a GUI, so if you want to test it out on local documents, it's simple to get up and running.

Tika is also embedded into several platforms, which you may use in your day-to-day interaction with a science data system or elsewhere; search platforms leverage it under the hood for document knowledge extraction and support.

We also dug into Safedocs, what the Safedocs program entailed, and why it's crucial for the PDF community in general. Compiling a corpus of about 8 million PDFs available to researchers and developers alike gives us the ability to create a more compliant, stable, bug-free platform that is more resilient to malware attacks and the like.

We also discuss the advent of more Vector Search tooling in open source platforms, for example, the addition of Vector Search to the Lucene platform, courtesy of the folks over at Elastic and how this is likely to help the LLM development space over the coming years.

On the vlog

I’m Tom Barber

I assist businesses in maximizing the value of their data, enhancing efficiency, performance, and gaining deeper insights. Find out more on my website.