Integrating open data sources can yield high value information but raises major problems in terms of metadata extraction, data source integration and visualization of integrated data. In this paper, we describe WebSmatch, a flexible environment for Web data integration, based on a real, end-to-end data integration scenario over public data from Data Publica. WebSmatch supports the full process of importing, refining and integrating data sources and uses third party tools for high quality visualization. We use a typical scenario of public data integration which involves problems not solved by currents tools: poorly structured input data sources (XLS files) and rich visualization of integrated data.
Document image analysis is the study of converting documents from paper form to an electronic form that captures the information content of the document. Necessary processing includes recognition of document layout (to determine reading order, and to distinguish text from diagrams), recognition of text (called Optical Character Recognition, OCR), and processing of diagrams and photographs. The processing of diagrams has been an active research area for several decades. A selection of existing diagram recognition techniques are presented in this paper. Challenging problems in diagram recognition include (1) the great diversity of diagram types, (2) the difficulty of adequately describing the syntax and semantics of diagram notations, and (3) the need to handle imaging noise. Recognition techniques that are discussed include blackboard systems, stochastic grammars, Hidden Markov Models, and graph grammars. We present an approach for classifying images of charts based on the shape and spatial relationships of their primitives. Five categories are considered: bar-charts, curve-plots, pie-charts, scatter-plots and surface-plots. We introduce two novel features to represent the structural information based on (a) region segmentation and (b) curve saliency. The local shape is characterized using the Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors. Each image is represented by sets of feature vectors of each modality. The similarity between two images is measured by the overlap in the distribution of the features -measured using the Pyramid Match algorithm. A test image is classified based on its similarity with training images from the categories. The approach is tested with a database of images collected from the Internet. 