Knowledge management is the ability to successfully store, process, and formulate knowledge. To succeed in today's sophisticated world you must have knowledge, but crucially, you must also be able to harness it in order to make critical decisions. In this era where information is prolific and overwhelming, the winners are going to be those who can store, process, and formulate knowledge from the chaos, operate upon it, and share it within their organisation. attey-group, in partnership with the North of England's leading Universities, assist our customers in achieving this goal. We offer consultancy on where to start; capturing of the required data; storage, management and publication of the information itself; and full analysis and interpretation as required.
Full project management and logistics capabilities are offered to our customers. Great attention to detail is taken in establishing your project aims, and care taken to fully achieve them. Reliable collection and/or receipt of documents, total security and efficient document handling and preparation are required before data entry can begin. We have our own extensive handling depot, logistics centre and storage facility where huge volumes of documents are carefully logged, checked and sorted on arrival, bar code labelled for accurate tracking, and any necessary preparation is carried out. This is a labour intensive activity that without experience and due care and attention is prone to errors. We have expert, experienced staff and well established procedures for implementing these activities with zero errors, and a highly polished bar code tracking system, developed by the University of Newcastle, to facilitate urgent retrievals or provide instant or even stream fed progress reports. At the end of a project we can either store the paper documents for you, coded for easy retrieval of individual items, return them to you or securely destroy them.
Data Entry and Data Capture by Forms Processing are offered as a bureau service, always using the most appropriate method to achieve speed, accuracy and cost efficiency in the data extraction, and ease of form completion where collection of information is to be forms based. Data can be collected from paper, fax or the Internet.
Well-designed and accurately printed forms are essential in successful data entry by forms processing, with automated OMR, OCR and ICR recognition technology and/or a 'key from image' process. In association with our University partners we have an outstanding team dedicated to specialist form design and a history of high quality printing that spans three centuries.
Using the latest design software and a combination of aesthetic skill and technical knowledge, we can re-design your existing forms to incorporate special features, such as black tests, white tests and skew marks so that they are always read correctly in OMR or OCR data entry, or we can develop new forms specifically tailored to your needs, including the formulation and drafting of questions when required.
Optical Mark Reading (OMR) is a process whereby marks made on a paper form, such as in tick boxes on a questionnaire or lottery card, are read by optical scanning. The information represented by those marks is entered into a computer as data at incredible speed. The forms are simple to complete and have a variety of uses, such as claims forms, market research and public opinion polls and forms to gather patient information for medical use or conducting national tests in schools.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) goes beyond simple mark reading. Paper forms and documents are optically scanned and the software 'reads' the printed words, again turning them into data at incredible speed. In this way the technology allows full text capture and extracts typed, hand written, and bar code information, and can also work together with OMR to collect combined tick box and text information from a single form. Built in validation and verification on customer defined rules and confidence limits ensure extremely high accuracy.
Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is also used to facilitate greater accuracy in extracting hand written information from a form. ICR uses neural network software which recognises patterns and can accept images as the raw input. It is not rules based, and it's learning aspects allow 'interactive verification' where the manual correction of a recognition error several times leads to the software continuing to correct similar errors.
Manual keying, despite the above revolutions in technology, still has an important roll to play. Through our partnership with the University of Newcastle, we are a major provider of this service, and we have a very large resource of skilled personnel to physically key information into computers with great speed and accuracy. There are many areas where this service is more appropriate than optical scanning, for example where low quality handwriting must be entered such as that of young children in national school tests, busy doctors on patient medical records, or different styles of many individuals in libraries or banks of record cards. It is also useful where other complications exist, such as a need to enter mathematical formulae or equations, and we have developed special interfaces for such areas. Also, documents themselves may be too fragile or of many varying sizes, ruling out batch scanning, and manual keying may offer the most cost effective solution if a digitally archived image is not required.
Once entered, sophisticated validation and verification of the data, developed and implemented by the University of Newcastle, ensures it is of extremely high accuracy. This is done as a standard procedure for manually keyed data, and as a belt and braces addition for optically scanned data where the process is already inherent in the software.
Data is finally fed back to our customers in the most useful format for them, through either batch or constant transfer to their target system, and with full tracking records available electronically at any time.
Analysis and interpretation of results are also offered, drawing on the expertise of our University partners. This can then be presented in any form of report that a customer may require, including publication on the Internet. Data Mining, through our expertise in Adaptive Systems, is also available to maximise the value that we can extract from the analysis of your data.
Data archiving and storage are offered in various forms, with full indexation of digital images for easy retrieval, and we can then develop and implement a fully integrated storage and data management strategy. Services available are:
Page Image Capture and Full Text Retrieval can be implemented where high volumes of paper documents need to be captured and managed and text retrieval is vital. Documents are scanned and stored as indexed page images. These images are then passed through a recognition engine to read all the text on all the pages. Text is then cleaned up to rid any inaccuracy in the recognition (typically 1-10%, depending on quality of the original text) and loaded into a full text engine. Here it can be edited or re-formatted as required, but most importantly the full text of the documents can be searched for relevant information and then page images retrieved to read or print out.
Acrobat Capture - Intelligent Page Capture - might be considered by customers who hold the bulk of their documents in digital format with a need to convert some paper documents into the same format. It is also ideal for publishers who wish to capture static pages and deliver them on CD ROM or across the Internet. Acrobat is a universal document viewer that allows digital documents to be automatically converted into page format and read. In addition to text recognition it recognises the fonts and the layout of the document so it preserves columns, paragraphs, graphic sections, etc.
Intelligent Document Capture, Markup and Publication are available by scanning paper documents to digitise them, then the page images are divided into zones containing text or graphic elements. The text is read and verified and edited, and the graphic elements are tagged and linked to the text. The data is then exported to a word processing or DTP package and formatted and/or marked up as required. This mark up can be to HTML for publication on the Internet.
FbI (film-based imaging), or Microfilm as it is often known, is still a valid medium for long term document and data storage where wide access, for example over the Internet, is not required. It has a readable life of up to 500 years, is technology proof and has fantastic archival capability. There is no need for periodic migration when software is upgraded, though the option for digitising the file is always open, and it eliminates the need for major hardware investment or operator training.
storageStorage Management is also available to our customers. There is a whole range of data storage systems available, and this can cause great confusion. While it is reasonable to expect modern operating systems to take care of all of the management issues which arise from the existence of optical disks, CD-ROM, magneto-optical disks, magnetic disks, magnetic tapes, optical tapes, jukeboxes and the myriad of other devices and technologies available, with new ones being developed every day, this is not the case. We have therefore developed various tools and strategies to deal with this situation. |
