Engineering
5 data extraction utility APIs that can come in handy
In this article we will explore how ApyHub can help you take away the complexity of extracting data from different types of documents (including images).
MA
Maria Hayat
Last updated on December 14, 2022
Every major industry today leverages data to gain meaningful industry insights, and promote data-driven decision making. At the same time, applications of data science are increasing every day.
Most web applications store, process and produce data that is often stored in structured formats, to be used for either record keeping or to gain additional insights into the usage of the application. Even a simple static website is embedded with different third-party tools, integrations and plug-ins that are used to monitor traffic to the website, and provide insights into their users.
A lot of data is still captured in files though - be it office documents, pdf files, images, videos and so on. This information was traditionally made to be consumed by other business users, but as applications start collecting and storing these documents and images at scale, the need to be able to search through this data and make these documents and images searchable becomes paramount.
However processing these different documents requires the use of different libraries and resources such as memory and compute that bloat your applications and often tend to be overlooked.
In this article we will explore how ApyHub can help you take away the complexity of extracting data from different types of documents (including images).
So, what is Data Extraction?
It is the process of extracting relevant information (from a user’ perspective) in a comprehensive manner.
While it might sound easy and straightforward, different file types come with their own unique styles of capturing and structuring information. This is why extracting just the right information can become a challenge.
Using Utility services for data extraction
Utility services that specialize in data extraction can make this process extremely smooth. These services use the best available tools and libraries to extract data from the documents or images. Moreover, integration of these services within your applications is extremely straightforward, as typically you just need to provide the files and receive the extracted data as a response.
Using utility services also reduces the overall load on your applications since the heavy lifting is outsourced to the provider and your applications can remain lean and clean without heavy dependencies o additional processing needed.
ApyHub Data Extraction APIs
With ApyHub, you can create a token for your clients (by creating an application in your workspace settings) and this token can be used to access the entire catalog of ApyHub’s utility services.
Need metadata about an image? Want to extract text from a document or webpage? Looking for something in a mountain of incoherent text? Here’s 5 Data Extraction Utility APIs that can come in handy:
- Extract Metadata from an Image Image metadata contains the entire DNA of an image. The metadata contains useful information that can be generated by the device capturing the image or important attributes such as any filters used, or information about intellectual property. Image metadata can be used to catalog and conceptualize visual information using attributes of the image. Use this tokenized API to generate metadata in text format, by uploading your image or providing an accessible URL.
- Extract content from a pdf While pdfs provide flexibility in sharing your documents and require no licensed software to view, making any modifications to the content contained within a pdf or simply extracting it, is not easy. By pointing this API to your pdf documents or an accessible link to your pdf, you can extract the content in your pdfs as a text string.
- Extract text from webpage Get the content of your webpages using this easy-to-use API. You can then modify or transform it into any format using Apyhub’s Text Converter utilities. This API requires only the url of your webpage to extract the content and provides a response as a text string.
- Extract text from word document This API comes in handy when you want to pull out the content from word documents. All you need to do is simply upload your word file or an accessible link to your word document and call this API, the content within the word document will be returned as a text string that can be used anywhere, modified, processed or reformatted.
- Miscellaneous keyword search in unstructured text ApyHub’s fuzzy search lets you search through large unstructured and often incoherent text data. All you need to do is search for your keywords, the API can return relevant results that could be misspelled or even spelled with accented letters. You can then use this API to search for a term likely to be relevant to a search argument, even if that content does not match the search query exactly. Fuzzy search uses a fuzzy matching program that checks the relevance of your keywords in the target data.
Find a host of other useful utility APIs, that provide easy to use endpoints for various small tasks including fetching country details, validating email addresses and domains, and converting files.
