Flexible content and metadata extraction framework

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting and querying full-text content and metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites, mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in these systems.

Features

• crawl information systems such as file systems, websites, mail boxes and mail servers
• extract full-text and metadata from many common file formats
• view files in their native applications
• ease of use: easy to learn, easy to code, easy to deploy in industrial projects
• flexible architecture: can be extended with custom file formats, data sources, etc., with support for deployment on OSGi platforms
• data exchange based on Semantic Web standards (e.g. RDF, SPARQL, ...)

Supported file formats

• plain text
• HTML, XHTML
• XML
• PDF (Portable Document Format)
• RTF (Rich Text Format)
• Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, Publisher
• Microsoft Works
• OpenOffice 1.x: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw
• StarOffice 6.x - 7.x+: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw
• OpenDocument (OpenOffice 2.x, StarOffice 8.x)
• Corel WordPerfect, Quattro, Presentations
• e-mails (.eml files)

Crawlers

Crawlers support the extraction of information from heterogenous data sources. At the moment we support the following source types:

• file systems (local, remote, removeable media)
• websites and intranets
• IMAP e-mail servers
• Microsoft Outlook (alpha)

Community

Aperture is developed by a community of developers and users, lead by engineers from Aduna and DFKI, the premier German institute for artificial intelligence research.