The HisClima database: historical weather logs for automatic transcription and information extraction

Abstract

Knowing the weather and atmospheric conditions from the past can help weather researchers to generate models like the ones used to predict how weather conditions are likely to change as global temperatures continue to rise. Many historical weather records are available from the past registered on a systemic basis. Historical weather logs were registered in ships, when they were on the high seas, recording daily weather conditions such as: wind speed, temperature, coordinates, etc. These historical documents represent an important source of knowledge with valuable information to extract climatic information of several centuries ago. This paper presents a database for researching about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems to extract relevant information from this source of knowledge. This database is composed mainly by handwritten tables that contain mostly numerical information. The problems on these documents are explained and baseline experiments are introduced on them.