Towards the development of user tools for knowledge acquisition in digital document analysis

Handwritten documents provide a rich source of data and, with the growth in the availability of digitised documents, it becomes increasingly important to improve our ability to analyse and extract “knowledge” from such sources. This paper describes an approach to the provision of tools which can extract information about the writer of handwritten documents, especially those which were written in earlier times and which constitute key elements in our heritage and culture. We show how the constraints inherent in such documents influence our analytical approach, and we also show how developing appropriate “knowledge extraction” techniques can also be essential in other, more general, important application scenarios.