Among other customers, GSA's CYCLOPS XTRACT is used in Street Encounters Form Processing solutions used at Bedford Police.  Contact GSA on 01455 299100 or click here to email for further details.   

... The innovative data capture power tool

... a key addition to GSA's CYCLOPS EDMS Suite of Programs

• Rapid Data Entry
• Key from Image
• Electronic Form Capture
• OCR—Optical Character Recognition
• ICR— Forms Character Recognition
• Barcode Recognition

Cyclops Xtract has been developed as a versatile, cost effective, data capture power-tool, readily customisable to each customer’s requirements and the specific demands of the application.

Cyclops Xtract is a key member of the Cyclops range of document management products from GSA.

Cyclops Xtract may be configured as a stand-alone data capture solution or combined with its sibling products Cyclops Document Management System, and/or CycFlow workflow to provide a coherent document and content management solution that not only archives document images but understands their contents and controls the processing. This is a very powerful concept which allows the collective knowledge to be accessible both by its users and the systems within the domain.

Productivity Benefits

Cyclops Xtract is fundamentally a power tool to assist with the overall data entry process, control the quality of the data extracted, and significantly increase the throughput performance achievable per user. Cyclops Xtract will help organizations to capture and manage information into databases, workflow & case management, document and content management systems. It will capture data from almost any source or delivery channel – scanned image, fax image, paper, electronic data and voice.

Cyclops Xtract  operates in two distinct modes; as a flexible key-from-image (KFI); and/or a powerful recognition assisted data entry (RADE) system. These may be set-up to best fit the application and provides users with:

• Reduced development effort and training costs with pre-made components and function libraries
• Apply contextual assistance and corporate knowledge during extraction and verification of the data.
• Data + contextual knowledge = Information.
• Focus resources on the exception items and let the system handle the rest
• Combine the strengths of both systems and users within the capture process

The Features

Scan & Import

Cyclops Xtract collects document images from its local or remote  ScanStation, or imports them from external sources. The ScanStation supports almost all commercial scanners and the import supports images and data streams from a variety of  sources e.g. FAX servers, other systems, etc. Data formats such as XML, HTML, ASCII and many standard word processing files may be imported or exported.

Single and multi-page documents may be handled as single documents or batches of documents using a flexible naming convention. The ScanStation user interface provides visual image quality inspection and control throughout the scanning process.

Automated image analysis and pre-processing may be applied to achieve the optimum image quality and document presentation for the capture processes. These preparation processes include: document de-skewing, background filtration, line and noise removal, etc.

The document identification option allows for the scanning of mixed documents thus reducing the task of manual sorting. The classification being performed by feature or textual analysis of the document’s distinguishing content.

Recognition Server

Recognition-assisted mode is an option within Cyclops Xtract and provides the ability to read machine-print, handprint, optical mark-sense, or bar-code.

                                                                      Client Workstation

Cyclops Xtract client workstation operates in two distinct modes dependent upon whether the system is operating in “key-from-image” or “recognition-assisted data entry”.

• During Key-from-image mode the client workstations provide an image-assisted high-speed key entry interface to the user. The document image together with the field in focus is presented in a pre-described sequence to the user to view and key. Contextual assistance and predictive prompting are provided to minimise keystrokes and control the quality of data entry. The ability of the user to navigate directly to specific fields of interest is fully supported using quick-access key conventions. 

• The key-from-image mode may be readily scripted to also perform direct key-from-paper or key-from-voice (call centre applications). In these modes the logical document template is displayed and updated dynamically as the fields are key-entered.
• During Recognition-assisted data entry mode the client workstation becomes an image assisted reject repair module for exception items raised during the recognition stage. The reject/repair mode automatically navigates to the field and characters requiring attention and applies the associated business rules to purify the resulting entries.

Cyclops Xtract may emulate double key entry to selected fields by applying recognition to the first pass followed by the user manually key-entering the data from the image of the field contents displayed. The two field entries may be compared by the system and errors highlighted in the event of non-correlation. This mode provides maximum assurance to those fields that cannot be validated by other means.

                                                                       Business Rules

Each document logic is subject to both application-specific rules and common business rules which, when applied to the extracted data, creates relevant information. This capability to read in context also provides data purification during the capture process to ensure its accuracy. This includes invalid data or omissions often introduced in the original documents. Many of these standard business rules and methods are inbuilt within Cyclops Xtract or supplied within functional libraries that may be readily applied within the document definition file. 

                                                                              Export

The export module may be specified to output both data and image in many formats including XML, HTML, ASCII, or standard word processing files. Cyclops Xtract may interface to ADO and ODBC compliant databases, and GSA’s CycFlow or other leading workflow, case management, and groupware products. 

The archive interface is standardised to work “out-of-the-box” with Cyclops Enterprise Document management system through the Cyc-Auto component API and shares a common environment to provide a total document and data management platform.

                                                                 Distributed Processing

Cyclops Xtract supports a scaleable and extensible architecture and features that support distributed processing. These features include remote scanning, and distributed completion. Users may be located anywhere, including   in-home using internet, and documents images fragmented into “snippets” to streamline key-entry and protect the document  contents (no client views complete document).

                                                                          Specification

• PC with Pentium 200 MHz processor or higher
• Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, NT Workstation 4.0 (with SP 3 or higher)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher
• Windows Common Controls 5.80 or higher and Rich Edit Control 3.0 or higher
• 128Mb of RAM
• 100Mb of free hard-disk space for minimum installation
• USB port for hard lock

• TIFF: bi-tonal uncompressed, CCITT3, CCITT4 for recognition
• Reference colour images may be used if available.

OCR Machine Print Recognition Option

• English language with dictionaries
• Full alpha-numeric with symbols both upper and lower case.
• Font sizes from 8 point upwards
• Mark detection

• English language with dictionaries
• Alpha-numeric character set with symbols (upper-case alpha)
• Constrained and unconstrained character recognition
• Removal of non drop-out character guidelines (boxes, combs, etc)

• Check Code 39, Check Interleaved 25, Code 128, Code 39,
• EAN 13, EAN 8, Interleaved 25

• TXT,MS Word
• XML,XSL, HTML,
• TIFF and PDF

• Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and above
• Other development tools that support COM and Active X objects

Automated electronic data capture can improve the business processes by improving the speed and accuracy with which inbound information is processed. Despite the migration towards the use of on-line electronic data the business world still relies heavily on paper documents for receiving information entry into their systems. Unfortunately this data is not available to the business systems until the information is extracted from their paper document containers and an estimated £18 billion is spent worldwide keying in and validating the data from these physical documents.

Cyclops Xtract is a flexible electronic data capture power tool for expediting the extraction of information entrapped within paper documents. Cyclops Xtract manages the complete lifecycle from the collection or scanning of inbound documents, the classification into document types and the extraction of relevant contents, through to their completion and validation then export of the information into the host business systems.

        Cyclops Xtract information

The following modules may be configured to provide the electronic data capture application platform:

• Production scanning facility with optional in-line bar-code recognition

• Optional in-line document classification

• Optional feature to enable the sorting of documents into document types

• Machine Print recognition
• Hand-written and machine print recognition categorised by throughput

• CORRECTION is where an operator checks 'read' data and corrects if required.
• If WorkFlow is part of the solution, WorkFlow E-Forms for errors and omissions can be generated from CORRECTION program

• Includes local archive
• Standard interface into Cyclops EDMS

Cyclops Xtract ADMIN

Cyclops Xtract DESIGNER

XTRACT Features

Server side Features

Client side Features

Features of the Administrator include:

Application DESIGNER Features

Training

Support