Glenn Ford

Automated data entry system: performance issues

This paper discusses the performance of a system for extracting bibliographic fields from scanned pages in biomedical journals to populate MEDLINE, the flagship database of the national Library of Medicine (NLM), and heavily used worldwide. This system consists of automated processes to extract the article title, author names, affiliations and abstract, and manual workstations for the entry of other required fields such as pagination, grant support information, databank accession numbers and others needed for a completed bibliographic record in MEDLINE. Labor and time data are given for (1) a wholly manual keyboarding process to create the records, (2) an OCR-based system that requires all fields except the abstract to be manually input, and (3) a more automated system that relies on document image analysis and understanding techniques for the extraction of several fields. It is shown that this last, most automated, approach requires less than 25% of the labor effort in the first, manual, process.

A testbed system for mobile point-of-care information delivery

PubMed on Tap is a testbed system that supports search of and retrieval from the National Library of Medicines MEDLINE/spl reg/ database from a PDA. The goal of the PubMed on Tap project is to discover and implement design principles for point-of-care delivery of clinical support information. The project explores user interface issues, information content and organization, and system performance. Here we present our progress in these areas.

Invited paper: Interactive publication: The document as a research tool

The increasing prevalence of multimedia and research data generated by scientific work affords an opportunity to reformulate the idea of a scientific article from the traditional static document, or even one with links to supplemental material in remote databases, to a self-contained, multimedia-rich interactive publication. This paper describes our concept of such a document, and the design of tools for authoring (Forge) and visualization/analysis (Panorama). They are platform-independent applications written in Java, and developed in Eclipse using its Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework. Both applications operate on PDF files with links to XML files that define the media type, location, and action to be performed. We also briefly cite the challenges posed by the potentially large size of interactive publications, the need for evaluating their value to improved comprehension and learning, and the need for their long-term preservation by the National Library of Medicine and other libraries.

Text Verification in an Automated System for the Extraction of Bibliographic Data

An essential stage in any text extraction system is the manual verification of the printed material converted by OCR. This proves to be the most labor-intensive step in the process. In a system built and deployed at the National Library of Medicine to automatically extract bibliographic data from scanned biomedical journals, alternative means were considered to validate the text. This paper describes two approaches and gives preliminary performance data.