French Ministry of Defense Processing World War I Archives

Today, Feb 2004

Enables Access the Records on the Internet

The French Ministry of Defense has partnered with recognition technology developer A2iA Corp. (www.a2ia.com) to read and process World War I archives. A2iA adapted its recognition engines to improve its performance on the handwriting style of that era.

November 11, 2003, (Armistice Day or Veteran's Day in the U.S.) was the 85th anniversary of the cease fire that ended World War I. At that time the Archive Department of the Ministry of Defense made World War I patriots' records available on the Internet. Making the task more challenging, among the 1,300 000 records, many contain medical information that must remain confidential in order to meet French legislation reguirements.

A2iA's FieldReader recognition product determines which records contain medical information and therefore need to remain undisclosed and enables the Ministry of Defense to effectively post only the details that are considered public information for people to access on the Internet.

The detection of medical information contained on the records was done in four steps:

1. The Recognition Zone is located using A2iA FieldReader's key word detection system. The field is automatically located even though its position varies on each form.

2. The "Cause of Death" field is recognized using A2iA's Intelligent Word Recognition Technology, by matching the handwritten information to a vocabulary of approximately 2,000 words in a dictionary to describe a cause of death.

3. Search for medical key words, which are matched against a dictionary containing 260 medical words.

4. Classification/Confidentiality: Depending on the presence or lack of a medical key word, the record remains classified or is posted on the website.

"Since its launch, the French Ministry of Defense's website has been a tremendous success," said Jean-Louis Fages, CEO of A2iA Corp. "We are very proud that A2iA FieldReader has enabled citizens to access information that remained unavailable for so long."

The public can access the site at www. memoiredeshommes.sga. defense, gouv.fr.

In a related story, Lockheed Martin has elected to incorporate the A2iA Field-Reader handwriting recognition engine into the UK Address Interpretation program for Royal Mail. The Address Interpretation program provides a complete system solution for both the automated and manual assignment of machine print and handwritten mail. It is currently operational at 72 Royal Mail centers in the UK.

A2iA FieldReader will be integrated into Lockheed Martin's system to further improve its automated handwritten recognition performance. The integration of A2iA's advanced recognition technology will allow Royal Mail to process mail more efficiently and reduce overall costs. A2iA's natural handwriting and print recognition technology recognizes whole words-whether cursive or machine print-rather than character-by-character. The technology is flexible enough to efficiently develop solutions for international languages and versions.