Research activities of Prof. Klaus U. Schulz

The work of Prof. Schulz concentrates on

- Semantic Search, Construction of Ontologies and Taxonomies

- Digital Libraries, Language Technology for Optical Character Recognition and Document Analysis

- Finite-State Technology

Projects and Spin-offs:

• IMPACT

In the i2010 vision of a European Digital Library, the EU launched an ambitious plan for large scale digitisation projects transforming Europe’s printed heritage into digitally available resources. The aim of fully integrating intellectual content into the modern information and communication technologies environment can only be achieved by full-text digitisation: transforming digital images of scanned books into electronic text. Over the last 2-3 years mass-digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world. Today, a number of advanced libraries in Europe are scanning millions of pages each year and large scale-digitisation is a matter of fact, not a vision any more. However, these efforts can tackle only a fraction of the total heritage available in cultural memory organisations. The digitised material is becoming available too slowly and in too small quantities from too few sources, for three reasons.

1. There is a lack of institutional knowledge and expertise which causes inefficiency and ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This is a problem for the vast majority of libraries, museums and archives in Europe.
2. The costs for full-featured electronic text of historical documents are much too high. Cultural heritage institutions will not be able to satisfy the needs of their users for electronic texts instead of pure digital images. Manual keying costs around 1 EUR per page, so that a typical book sums up to 400, 500 or even 1000 EUR.
3. Automated text recognition, carried out by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines does in many cases not produce satisfying results for historical documents. Recognition rates are poor or even useless. No commercial or other OCR engine is able to cope satisfactorily with the wide range of printed materials published between the start of the Gutenberg age in the 15th century and the start of the industrial production of books in the middle of the 19th century.

IMPACT as a network of centres of competence brings together 22 national and regional libraries, research institutions and commercial suppliers.

• TOPICZOOM

Zoom from information to knowledge. The intelligent access to text published in vast Internet media, in archives, and document collections in general is more and more one of the decisive factors for success. People in their roles as private members of communities and in their role as professionals need to gather knowledge in an efficient way. On the other hand, companies, public institutions and organizations of any kind have to present their materials in an approachable form. The semantic technologies developed by the team of TopicZoom provide a solution for these demands of the information age that goes far beyond the technologies of classic full-text search. TopicZoom is a LMU spin-off founded by members of the Center of Information and Language Processing (CIS).