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What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences

What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.

Alex3917 7y ago
So I have a lot of experience with basically the same problem just from working on this: https://www.prettyfwd.com https://www.prettyfwd.com. As an example of the opportunity size just in the email domain, the amount of personal non-spam email sent every day is like 100x the total size of Wikipedia, but nothing is really done with any of this information because of this challenge. Basically applications are things like: - Better search engine results - Identifying experts within a company - Better machine translation - Finding accounting fraud - Automating legal processes For context, the reason why Facebook is the most successful social network is that they're able to turn behavioral residue into content. If you can get better at taking garbage data and repackaging it into something useful, it stands to reason that there are lots of other companies the size of Facebook that can be created.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I often ponder how much of the "old world" will get "digitalized" — translated in numeric form, bits. And how much will just disappear. The question might seem trivial if you think of books, but now think of architecture, language itself (as it evolves), etc. There's almost no question in my mind that most new data will endure in some form, by virtue of being digital from day 1. The endgame for such a company, imho, is to become the "source entity" of information management (in abstracted form), whose two major products are one to express this information in the digital space, and the other in the analog/physical space. You may imagine variations of both (e.g. AR/VR for the former). Kinda like language in the brain is "abstract" (A) (concept = pattern of neurons firing) and then speech "translates" into a given language, like English (B) or French (C) (different sets of neurons). So from A you easily go to either B or C or D... We've observed that Deep Learning actually does that for translation (there's a "new" "hidden" language in the neural net that expresses all human languages in a generic form of sorts, i.e. "A" in the above example). The similarities of the ontology of language, and the ontology of information in a system (e.g. business) are remarkable — and what you want is really this fundamental object A, this abstract form which then generates all possible expressions of it (among which a little subset of ~1,000 gives you human languages, a mere 300 active iirc; and you might extend that into any formal language fitting the domain, like engineering math/physics, programming code, measurements/KPI, etc. It's a daunting task for sure but doable because the space is highly finite (nothing like behavior for instance; and you make it finite through formalization, provided your first goal is to translate e.g. business knowledge, not Shakespeare). It's also a one-off thing because then you may just iterate (refine) or fork, if the basis is sound enough. I know it all sounds sci-fi but having looked at the problem from many angles, I've seen the PoC for every step (notably linguistics software before neural nets was really interesting, producing topological graphs in n dimensions of concepts e.g. by association). I'm pretty sure that's the future paradigm of "information encoding" and subsequent decoding, expression. It's just really big, like telling people in the 1950's that because of this IBM thing, eventually everybody will have to get up to speed like it's 1990 already. But some people "knew", as in seeing the "possible" and even "likely". These were the ones who went on to make those techs and products.
  - IceKarma 7y ago
    Digital data is arguably more fragile than analogue, offline, paper (or papyrus, or clay tablet) media. We have documents over 3000 years old that can still be read. Meanwhile, the proprietary software necessary to access many existing digital data formats is tied to obsolete hardware, working examples of which may no longer exist, emulators for which may not exist, and insufficient documentation may exist to even enable their creation. Just as one example, see the difficulty in enabling modern access to the BBC's 1986 Domesday Project.
greycol 7y ago
Almost any business that has physical suppliers or business customers. PDF is de-facto standard for any invoicing, POs, quotes, etc. If you solve the problem you can effectively programmatically deal with invoicing/payments/ large parts of ordering/dispensing. It's a no brainer to add it on to almost any financial/procurement software that deals with inter business stuff. Any small-medium physical business can probably half their financial department if you can dependably solve this issue.
- innomatics 7y ago
  A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process, or adopting interchange formats. Problem for some small-business is the cost (process changes, licencing etc) of adopting interchange formats and working with large vendors is prohibitive at their scale e.g. the airline BSP system. I agree that solving the problem generally i.e. replacing an accounts payable staff person capable of processing arbitrary invoice documents will be comparable to self-driving in difficulty. If a company deals with a lot of a single type of PDF, then the approach could be economical. I am actually involved in a project looking at doing this with AWS Textract.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Building machines that understand formats that are understood by humans is exactly what we should be doing. People should read, write, and process information in a format that is comfortable and optimized to them. Machines should bend to us, we should not bend to them. If businesses only dealt with machine readable formats, everyone's computer would still be using the command line. And there's real condescension in your post: > Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process You're saying that businesses need to change their business to accommodate data formats, but it should be the other way around.
tony0x02 7y ago
The patent office?
dscpls 7y ago
Organisations that have existing business processes to publish to print and pdf but now want to publish in responsive formata for mobile or even desktop web. Changing their process might be more expensive than paying a lot of money for them to carry on as is for a few more years while getting the benefit of modern eyes on their content. Edit: concrete example would be government publications like budget narrative documents.
bjonnh 7y ago
Academics and other people that rely on scientific publications. Most of the world's knowledge in science is locked into PDFs and screenshots (or even pictures) of manufacturer's (often proprietary) software... So extracting it in a more structured way would be a win (so HTML may not be best). On a related note, I've seen people using Okular to convert PDF tables to a usable form (to be honest its table extraction tool is one of the best i've seen despite being pretty manual).
speedplane 7y ago
> What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most. Legal technology. Pretty much everything a lawyer submits to a court is in PDF, or is physically mailed and then scanned in as PDF. If you want to build any technology that understands the law, you have to understand PDFs.

Alex3917 7y ago

So I have a lot of experience with basically the same problem just from working on this: https://www.prettyfwd.com https://www.prettyfwd.com. As an example of the opportunity size just in the email domain, the amount of personal non-spam email sent every day is like 100x the total size of Wikipedia, but nothing is really done with any of this information because of this challenge. Basically applications are things like: - Better search engine results - Identifying experts within a company - Better machine translation - Finding accounting fraud - Automating legal processes For context, the reason why Facebook is the most successful social network is that they're able to turn behavioral residue into content. If you can get better at taking garbage data and repackaging it into something useful, it stands to reason that there are lots of other companies the size of Facebook that can be created.

K0SM0S 7y ago
I often ponder how much of the "old world" will get "digitalized" — translated in numeric form, bits. And how much will just disappear. The question might seem trivial if you think of books, but now think of architecture, language itself (as it evolves), etc. There's almost no question in my mind that most new data will endure in some form, by virtue of being digital from day 1. The endgame for such a company, imho, is to become the "source entity" of information management (in abstracted form), whose two major products are one to express this information in the digital space, and the other in the analog/physical space. You may imagine variations of both (e.g. AR/VR for the former). Kinda like language in the brain is "abstract" (A) (concept = pattern of neurons firing) and then speech "translates" into a given language, like English (B) or French (C) (different sets of neurons). So from A you easily go to either B or C or D... We've observed that Deep Learning actually does that for translation (there's a "new" "hidden" language in the neural net that expresses all human languages in a generic form of sorts, i.e. "A" in the above example). The similarities of the ontology of language, and the ontology of information in a system (e.g. business) are remarkable — and what you want is really this fundamental object A, this abstract form which then generates all possible expressions of it (among which a little subset of ~1,000 gives you human languages, a mere 300 active iirc; and you might extend that into any formal language fitting the domain, like engineering math/physics, programming code, measurements/KPI, etc. It's a daunting task for sure but doable because the space is highly finite (nothing like behavior for instance; and you make it finite through formalization, provided your first goal is to translate e.g. business knowledge, not Shakespeare). It's also a one-off thing because then you may just iterate (refine) or fork, if the basis is sound enough. I know it all sounds sci-fi but having looked at the problem from many angles, I've seen the PoC for every step (notably linguistics software before neural nets was really interesting, producing topological graphs in n dimensions of concepts e.g. by association). I'm pretty sure that's the future paradigm of "information encoding" and subsequent decoding, expression. It's just really big, like telling people in the 1950's that because of this IBM thing, eventually everybody will have to get up to speed like it's 1990 already. But some people "knew", as in seeing the "possible" and even "likely". These were the ones who went on to make those techs and products.
- IceKarma 7y ago
  Digital data is arguably more fragile than analogue, offline, paper (or papyrus, or clay tablet) media. We have documents over 3000 years old that can still be read. Meanwhile, the proprietary software necessary to access many existing digital data formats is tied to obsolete hardware, working examples of which may no longer exist, emulators for which may not exist, and insufficient documentation may exist to even enable their creation. Just as one example, see the difficulty in enabling modern access to the BBC's 1986 Domesday Project.

greycol 7y ago

Almost any business that has physical suppliers or business customers. PDF is de-facto standard for any invoicing, POs, quotes, etc. If you solve the problem you can effectively programmatically deal with invoicing/payments/ large parts of ordering/dispensing. It's a no brainer to add it on to almost any financial/procurement software that deals with inter business stuff. Any small-medium physical business can probably half their financial department if you can dependably solve this issue.

innomatics 7y ago
A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process, or adopting interchange formats. Problem for some small-business is the cost (process changes, licencing etc) of adopting interchange formats and working with large vendors is prohibitive at their scale e.g. the airline BSP system. I agree that solving the problem generally i.e. replacing an accounts payable staff person capable of processing arbitrary invoice documents will be comparable to self-driving in difficulty. If a company deals with a lot of a single type of PDF, then the approach could be economical. I am actually involved in a project looking at doing this with AWS Textract.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > A business that invests in building a machine that reads data, produced by a 3rd party machine, using format intended for lay humans to read, is not investing in the right tech IMO. Building machines that understand formats that are understood by humans is exactly what we should be doing. People should read, write, and process information in a format that is comfortable and optimized to them. Machines should bend to us, we should not bend to them. If businesses only dealt with machine readable formats, everyone's computer would still be using the command line. And there's real condescension in your post: > Small-mediums should be looking to consolidate buying through a few good suppliers and working with them directly to automate process You're saying that businesses need to change their business to accommodate data formats, but it should be the other way around.

tony0x02 7y ago

The patent office?

dscpls 7y ago

Organisations that have existing business processes to publish to print and pdf but now want to publish in responsive formata for mobile or even desktop web. Changing their process might be more expensive than paying a lot of money for them to carry on as is for a few more years while getting the benefit of modern eyes on their content. Edit: concrete example would be government publications like budget narrative documents.

bjonnh 7y ago

Academics and other people that rely on scientific publications. Most of the world's knowledge in science is locked into PDFs and screenshots (or even pictures) of manufacturer's (often proprietary) software... So extracting it in a more structured way would be a win (so HTML may not be best). On a related note, I've seen people using Okular to convert PDF tables to a usable form (to be honest its table extraction tool is one of the best i've seen despite being pretty manual).

speedplane 7y ago

> What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most. Legal technology. Pretty much everything a lawyer submits to a court is in PDF, or is physically mailed and then scanned in as PDF. If you want to build any technology that understands the law, you have to understand PDFs.