tika-ocr-inputformat

Digitization of documents with Tika on Databricks : The volume of available data is growing by the second. About 64 zettabytes was created or copied last year, according to IDC, a technology market research firm. By 2025, this number will grow to an estimated 175 zetabytes, and it is becoming increasingly granular and difficult to codify, unify, and centralize. And though more financial services institutions (FSIs) are talking about big data and using technology to capture more data than ever, Forrester reports that 70% of all data within an enterprise still goes unused for analytics. The open source nature of Lakehouse for Financial Services makes it possible for bank compliance officers, insurance underwriting agents or claim adjusters to combine latest technologies in optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) in order to transform any financial document, in any format, into valuable data assets. The Apache Tika toolkit detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types (such as PPT, XLS, and PDF). Combined with [Tesseract](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software), the most commonly used OCR technology, there is literally no limit to what files we can ingest, store and exploit for analytics / operation purpose.

Project Support

Please note that all projects in the /databrickslabs github account are provided for your exploration only, and are not formally supported by Databricks with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). They are provided AS-IS and we do not make any guarantees of any kind. Please do not submit a support ticket relating to any issues arising from the use of these projects.

Any issues discovered through the use of this project should be filed as GitHub Issues on the Repo. They will be reviewed as time permits, but there are no formal SLAs for support.

Building the Project

mvn clean install

Deploying / Installing the Project

mvn release:prepare

Releasing the Project

mvn release:perform

Using the Project

Add com.databricks.labs:tika-ocr:0.1.4 maven dependency to your databricks runtime. Alternatively, compile this project with maven profile shaded enabled to generate an uber jar that you upload to your databricks runtime. You can now read any file, extracting text content from any file format.

spark.read.format('tika').load(path_to_any_file)

For Tesseract support, please make sure Tesseract library is available on each executor. This can be achieved using a simple init script as follows

#!/usr/bin/env bash
sudo apt-get install -y tesseract-ocr