Knowledge-based metadata extraction from PostScript files

The automatic document metadata extraction process is animportant task in a world where thousands of documents are just one``click'' away. Thus, powerful indices are necessary to support effective retrieval. The upcoming XML standard represents an important step in this direction as itssemistructuredrepresentation conveys document metadata together with the text of the document. For example, retrieval of scientific papers by authors or affiliations would be a straightforward tasks if papers were stored in XML.Unfortunately, today, the largest majority of documents on the web are available in forms that do not carryadditional semantics. Converting existing documents to a semistructured representation is time consuming and no automatic process can be easily applied. In this paper we discuss a system, based on a novel spatial/visualknowledge principle, for extracting metadata from scientific papers storedas PostScript files. Our system embeds the general knowledge about the graphical layout of a scientific paper to guide the metadata extraction process. Our system can effectively assist the automatic index creation for digital libraries.