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02.04.08 Cognitive Technologies opened OCR Cuneiform sources

Cognitive Technologies announces source code opening for its machine printed character recognition package (known as Cuneiform product). BSD license (Berkeley Software Distribution) is selected to distribute this program. Source code is available for downloading starting April, 2nd Y2008 on www.cuneiform.ru company’s site.

Creation and development of OCR technologies is truly sophisticated scientific task with 50+ year history. Today OCR is more than a isolated product, it is widely used as built-in part of information systems including office’s programs like MS Word. Publishing sources of Cuneiform as system with industrial recognition rate, company opens up a rich opportunity of OCR incorporation to different software products and gets involved in the OCR-technology enhancement of the whole Open source community.

This event is the next stage of the realization of “Recognition should be present in every computer” program, within which community of Open source developers will be included to OCR project. First stage of this program (“free Cuneiform”) caused huge public interest, undoubtedly. This is confirmed by 300,000 times of Cuneiform downloading on www.cuneiform.ru site only. Total number of package downloading is over than 700K.

The main reason of choosing of BSD license for opening of the Cuneiform core is research and educational orientation of this project. Our expectations are to achieve the new fruitful ideas and methods for OCR technologies as basis of the new generation of OCR-systems, including OCR-services. BSD status means permission to use the results of this project for business purposes.

“During progress of project we are going to work in close cooperation with community and analyze a possible migration to GPL (General Public License) license scheme of whole program or its parts”, - said V. V. Arlazarov, project manager of Open Source in Cognitive Technologies.

At this time more than 30 developers from different countries were registered as participants in the project. Roadmap for Y2008 includes creation of the first version of Open Source OCR basing on Cuneiform. The first-priority directions are as follows: up-to-date interface, Linux support and adding of the new recognition languages.

In the same time with source code opening Cognitive Technologies completes a creation of Web-service to provide recognition service to remote customers via Internet w/o software installation to their local PCs.

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