Using Display Screen OCR for Application Integration

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<h1>Using Display Screen OCR for Application Integration</h1><strong> Author: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/profile_SeeScreen Technology.aspx'>SeeScreen Technology</a></strong><br /><p>Application Integration is the process of joining two or more computer software systems to increase the automation of business processes. Application Integration aims to make business processes more efficient and more effective. Application Integration often involves sharing functionality and data across software systems that were not designed to work together. When it is too costly or otherwise infeasible to change these software systems and the benefits of joining them are substantial middleware is used to connect them together. Middleware is software that creates a connection between two or more software systems by translating the outputs (data or commands) from one software system into the inputs (data or commands) of the other software system. In order for Middleware to connect software systems together there must be a way to obtain the outputs from one software system and a way to provide these outputs as inputs to the other software system. Very often with legacy systems at least one of these requirements are missing. One way to obtain outputs is called Screen Scraping. Screen Scraping gets its data directly from the part of the system that interacts with the human computer user, called the User Interface. Before the 1990's all user interfaces were based on text characters that were displayed on the screen, so screen scraping was possible by simply obtaining the data associated with the display screen. With the modern Graphical User Interface (GUI), however, operating systems no longer display characters on the screen. Instead, they display little pictures of characters called Character Glyphs, which are formed from dozens of tiny colored dots called Pixels. Because of this change, Screen Scraping is now much more difficult thus adversely affecting application integration and data transfer solutions. Searching for Viable Screen Scraping Solutions Software that looks inside an application program or Operating System to obtain the display screen data is a good solution in the cases where it works. The problem is that it often does not work because it depends upon the implementation details of the underlying application or operating system. Optical Character recognition (OCR) translates graphic images (pictures) of characters into the actual characters and comes in two forms: Conventional OCR and Display Screen OCR. The use of conventional OCR is one solution to our problem, but because conventional OCR estimates rather than determines the values of characters, conventional OCR is never completely reliable for obtaining data from the Computer Display Screen. Last, but not least, Display Screen OCR provides a solution that works across most any hardware and software system because Display Screen OCR does not depend upon the implementation details of these underlying systems. Also because Display Screen OCR determines rather than estimates, its character matches, Display Screen OCR provides 100% Accuracy when recognizing characters from the computer display screen. Why use Display Screen OCR for Application Integration? • Display Screen OCR connects software systems together to more fully automate more aspects of existing business processes. • Display Screen OCR often connects software systems together at a much lower cost than changing these systems. • Display Screen OCR provides a way for software systems to interoperate when changing these systems is infeasible and alternative interfaces do not exist. • Because Display Screen OCR recognizes characters from the computer display screen it works with most any software system that displays its data as characters on the screen. </p><strong>About the Author:</strong><br /><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.ocr4screen.com/">OCR4Screen</a> will be available as an ActiveX component that can directly plug in to most any programming language on the Microsoft Windows platform. As long as the language works with ActiveX, it will work with OCR4Screen.<p> Article Source: <a href='http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Using-Display-Screen-OCR-for-Application-Integration_72466.aspx'> http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Using Display Screen OCR for Application Integration_72466.aspx</a></p>

Article Source : http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Using Display Screen OCR for Application Integration_72466.aspx

Keywords : OCR, Screen Scraping, Application Integration, Display Screen, Display Screen OCR,

Category : Computers : Software