Automatic tagging: Overview & Software

In many cases it is necessary to collect key words and meta data in a document, so as to locate them again without problems at a later date. Association to a project, a commission, a client, a product etc. is also often done via corresponding tagging. The user can make the respective entries into the applicable software interface, for example bitfarm-Archiv Document Management calls these “supplementary boxes”.

Information is automatically selected via basic rules

Manual tagging by the user is very time consuming. Therefore Enterprise-DMS solutions include also automatic tagging. Basic rules – set, adjusted and tended to by the system manager – can automatically select information in common file types via DMS and store them as key words.

Specific patterns can also be recognised in unknown documents with the help of common tags. E.g., if a commission or project reference number always has a specific form, the software recognises these on all documents and automatically tends to these meta data and thus the document's affiliation to a commission or project record.

Is automatic or manual tagging required?

In many cases tagging is not necessarily imperative thanks to highly efficient OCR and fast databases. Almost all documents can be located quickly and accurately via full-text search – even in large archives. When to use automatic or manual tagging or when the use of the full-text search is enough, is one of the topics in planning an electronic Document Management System.

Summing up, the main advantages are:

• Low staffing requirements: Processing time per piece of documents can be kept to a minimum.
• The indexing results are immediately available when the documentation units/objects have been entered into the system and can be utilized for investigation.
• reliable: The quality of the results produced by automatic indexing is consistent.
• Increase in documentation volume without raising costs: The reduced personnel effort enables for a rise in the number of documentation units to be recorded without an equal increase in expenditures.
• Very well adapted to papers that are pre-structured or have a generally homogeneous structure with limited language diversity.

Auto Tagging Software

In digital document management systems, automatic indexing (automatic keywording) is a method for creating content-related metadata. After a documentation unit (document, file, audiovisual recording, etc.) has been intellectually processed, keywords are assigned, and these are frequently appended to metadata records in a database or equivalent. The intellectual processing of the content is outsourced to a software solution in the case of automatic indexing, on the other hand. Various preset analytical processes are utilized to try to attain a result as close to hand indexing as possible.The difference between manual indexing results and the effort required varies substantially.

Since 2003 we offer our open-source document management system bitfarm-Archiv, which can also be used as an auto tagging software. License free and flexibly adaptable to the wishes of the user. Our GPL version can also be used for commercial purposes.

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