S2Doc -- Spatial-Semantic Document Format
This addresses a problem for researchers and practitioners in document processing by providing a unified format, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing modeling concepts.
The paper tackled the lack of standardization in modeling documents and tables by developing S2Doc, a flexible data structure that combines spatial and semantic information in a single format, designed to be extendable and support various modeling approaches.
Documents are a common way to store and share information, with tables being an important part of many documents. However, there is no real common understanding of how to model documents and tables in particular. Because of this lack of standardization, most scientific approaches have their own way of modeling documents and tables, leading to a variety of different data structures and formats that are not directly compatible. Furthermore, most data models focus on either the spatial or the semantic structure of a document, neglecting the other aspect. To address this, we developed S2Doc, a flexible data structure for modeling documents and tables that combines both spatial and semantic information in a single format. It is designed to be easily extendable to new tasks and supports most modeling approaches for documents and tables, including multi-page documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach of its kind to combine all these aspects in a single format.