Information Extraction in Editorial Setting. A Tale of PDFs

Abstract

In the last decade the Semantic Web initiative has promoted the construction of knowledge resources that are understandable by both humans and machines. Nonetheless considerable scientific and technical content is still locked behind proprietary formats, especially PDF files. While many solutions have been proposed to shift the publishing mechanism to more accessible formats, we believe that is paramount, especially in business scenarios, to be able to tap into this type of content and be able to extract machine readable semantic information from it. In this demo we show how we can process and semantically annotate Medication Package Inserts, publicly available from the pharmaceutical companies in the form of PDF files. Our proposed solution is fully integrated with a standard PDF viewer and does not require the subject matter expert to use any external software.