Document Scraping and Parsing Solutions

In a modern digital environment, paper documents are more and more often substituted with PDF documents that have already become a handy go-to solution for business data exchange. Due to a pixel-perfect presentation, such documents can be well viewed on any device, which makes them convenient for everyday usage.

However, being human-readable, portable, platform-independent, and perfectly compatible across devices, PDFs are, as a rule, unstructured, rarely come with machine-readable metadata, and do not provide any hierarchical tags to facilitate programmatic understanding of their content. Even though the amounts of text information in PDF documents are tremendous, it’s difficult to access, structure, and extract this data for proper analysis.

PDF scraping, though being rather a challenging task, may help to automate data extractions from this file format. Like web site or web pages scraping, the document scraping process presupposes collecting, transforming, and storing any publicly available web documents. It could be any statistical data from local, state, or federal government legal documents, any kind of market research, healthcare regulations, and more.

Scraping PDF data is highly valuable in the spheres where extensive sets of printed data sheets need to be analyzed. Special web scraping tools able to handle PDF scraping tasks can simplify the challenge through digitizing this tremendous amount of information and directly affect the business bottom-line.

Document parsing is the process of text extraction, recognition, and structuring documents to standard and workable formats. It’s a powerful method to automatically transform semi-structured texts into structured data.

PDF files are a portable version for multifaceted types of documents, ranging from books, brochures, reports, and presentations to invoices, purchase orders, and bank statements. Besides, they allow embedding various media types and attachments.  Thus, PDF scarping and parsing solutions are commonly used to extract:

• Text content,
• Single data fields (tracking numbers, dates, costs…),
• Lists and tables’ data,
• Images.

From our experience, despite IT technologies, a huge number of documents (especially government documents) still are unstructured and unworkable. The possibility to scrape a PDF file highly depends on the nature of the document and digital solutions used.  So, if your business requires clean and structured documents scraped from the web, our document scraping, and parsing service is for you!

We deal with

Text-Based PDF documents: creating specific data extraction templates based on data regions and fields. This may be quite handy when you scrape information from tables, such as, for instance, invoices or purchase orders.

Form-Based PDFs: Multifaceted businesses gather information using forms, such as customer feedback or satisfaction surveys. It results in PDF documents that contain multiple fields and variable tables.  To cope with the challenge, special models can be created in order to select only the precise table and field that you wish to scrape data from. Such models can be reused, customized, or altered according to your needs.

Scanned PDFs (image-based documents): It’s usually the most non-trivial task to cope with since scanned documents can contain data in all shapes and sizes. However, DataOx knows how to effectively get over the difficulty with the specific extraction templates created for the purpose.

A lot of valuable but messy business information can be found on the US Securities and Exchange Commission website (sec.gov). By scraping, parsing, and cleansing these documents, you will get really helpful data.

First, we collect the needed documents and parse them. Once we get the information parsed from target PDFs we cleanse and format it in various file formats like Excel, CSV, JSON, or XML using a standard structure compatible with your storage system and with the features you require. For example, if you want to tag each document to make it searchable or categorize it, we do that and then store it in your software ecosystem or provide it to you via a standard file transfer protocol (FTP) or database.

Incremental document scraping

Often our clients need to monitor some web resources for new or arriving documents they are interested in. We set the data feed, and you get new, clean, and automatically structured documents as soon as they appear on the original web sources.

We have a client whose businesses are focused on legal research. We collect, transform, and format thousands of legal documents and statutes for them from all US states.

However, each US state has its own standard of presenting statutes and legislative documents. So we had to develop general rules that reformatted all the documents to one standard. Many parts of these documents were in PDF format, so our quality assurance engineers spent hundreds of hours manually checking each statute of each US state to prevent a mistake from costing our client valuable money and resources.

DataOx provides data delivery services and custom software development.

In the first case, our clients get pure data they have requested. Our company handles the whole technical part of the process and provides the client only with clean, accurate, and relevant information, structured and formatted as it was ordered. As it’s clear from the example above our team can deal with one-time data scraping task or incremental sessions scheduled according to the client’s request.

In case you wish to have an in-house solution for your PDF scraping tasks, we will craft it for you with all the specifications and requirements considered and taken into consideration. However, choosing a software solution development, you should remember that it will require further maintenance and support. It’s vital to take this fact into consideration to estimate your budget and future expenses for software maintenance.

If you want a professional consultation regarding your business needs, schedule a free consultation with our web scraping expert.