While many of its applications are for use by individual users, BCL also tailors its software solutions to meet the repurposing needs of corporate clients in the data mining industry, to help them handle content extraction and indexing of incoming documents in an efficient way.

The following are companies that are using BCL data mining software solutions, specifically created to suit their needs.

Donnelley Jade

Developed by BCL Technologies for Donnelley Financial Group, a leading financial printer of SEC compliant documents in EDGAR II HTML and EDGAR ASCII format.

The Company
Headquartered in Chicago Illinois, with regional offices throughout the world. R.R. Donnelley Financial provides premier information management and printing services to the worldwide business community. State-of-the-art technology combined with process expertise, results in total solutions for the document management and distribution needs of their customers. Using the latest in digital communication to link their worldwide network of production facilities. This, plus the capability to implement solutions in both paper and electronic formats, helps them communicate effectively and efficiently with their customers.

The Challenge
Two years ago, RRDF was faced with the challenge of reducing turnaround time for conversion of native Desktop (DTP) documents to the appropriate EDGAR II HTML and EDGAR ASCII formats for filing with the SEC. The challenge was to utilize Adobe® Acrobat®'s PDF capabilities while also allowing for extraction and conversion of content into editable HTML 3.2 and RTF file formats, with or without graphics.

BCL's Solution
In November 1999, RRDF's Integration Engineering Team awarded a contract to Santa Clara-based BCL Technologies (BCL) for the development of a software solution. Together, RRDF and BCL developed Donnelley Jade. Donnelley Jade, a plug-in for Adobe® Acrobat® 4.0 designed to maximize efficiency in the data conversion process. Donnelley Jade converts PDF files into SEC-compliant EDGAR II HTML and RTF for RRDF's EDGAR ASCII filing purposes. In addition, it is capable of converting PDF documents into standard Web HTML and RTF files, giving it the potential to serve as a powerful data conversion tool for other R.R. Donnelley work groups. As a plug-in for Adobe® Acrobat® (Windows® version 4.0 or above), it converts PDF files (or any native or postscript file format that can be converted into PDF) into SEC-compliant EDGAR II HTML 3.2. Using a unique "zoning" technology patented by BCL, Donnelley Jade takes graphically complex SEC-related financial documents and automatically separates their structures into zones. (Each zone consists of a single element -- a graphic, piece of text, list or table.) The software can then either automatically sequence the zones into a natural reading order or allow users to fine tune or re-sequence (or both) them using a zone editor before outputting them to searchable, downloadable, SEC-compliant HTML 3.2. "Donnelley Jade already has proven itself," says Joe Raza, Project Manager for Donnelley Jade. "We have reduced our turnaround times for SEC filing of non-proprietary (CFS and ProFile) documents by 75 percent." RRDF accomplishes this by writing native DTP documents into PDF format, then using Donnelley Jade to do the final conversion. It can be installed on any Windows® system running 95, 98, NT, 2000 or ME. In addition to converting PDF files to EDGAR II HTML 3.2, it can be used to extract text, tables and graphics from PDF files into RTF in order to recreate the documents in DTP or proprietary applications. It can also be used as an intermediate process file conversion tool for converting client-supplied DTP (or PDF) files to Web HTML via RTF. Because users can employ the zone editor to either fine tune or re-sequence (or both) the zones before a document is converted, Donnelley Jade allows for a great degree of control over the output without having to resort to an HTML editor to refine the document's final appearance. "This software prevents complex PDF documents from becoming publishing 'dead ends,'" says Raza. "Donnelley Jade lets users bring documents back to the desktop for multipurpose use."

Contact information for R.R.Donnelly, www.rrdonnelly.com

Thomson Financial QuickTOC
Developed by BCL Technologies for Thomson Financial, a leading provider of in-depth business research and analysis.

The Company
Based in Boston, Thomson Financial offers the largest electronic collection of investment research, market intelligence and trade association information available anywhere. A division of Thomson Financial Services, it provides analysis and reports on thousands of companies around the world. Whether its clients are investigating an entire industry or a niche market, Thomson Financial provides an extensive collection of detailed reports and expertise on industry trends and forecasts, competitive developments, market share, emerging technologies and market potential.

The Challenge
In an effort to better serve its clients, Thomson Financial made a commitment to improving its handling of incoming documents. As the company acquires documents for its massive electronic library, relevant data from each must be extracted and indexed for easy access. Because all of this data is available for sale, Thomson's clients need a readily accessible summary of all available information and a table of contents for each document.

BCL's Solution
Using proprietary technology it has developed for document management, BCL was able to develop QuickTOC, a complete data extraction and indexing solution for Thomson Financial. The software parses an incoming PDF document and searches for major headers. It then places those headers into a table of contents (thus, TOC). The table of contents or bookmarks are then put into a new PDF document where they are converted into links that can take an Thomson client to the exact spot in the document from which the header was originally extracted. (QuickTOC doesn't require that a table of contents developed be made up of headers, however, those are the criteria Thomson used for its needs.) As part of its contract with the company, BCL has continuously worked with key personnel at Thomson to improve access to the vast library of information Thomson Financial provides to its clients.

Contact information for Thomson, www.tfn.com

Infosis Jade
Developed by BCL Technologies for The Infosis Corporation, a leader in merging the wealth of the web with the power of print.

The Company
Based both in Boston and the United Kingdom, The Infosis Corp. provides a range of electronic parallel publishing services to the publishing industry. The company's primary focus is in services that leverage the content and brand identity of existing print products, providing its clients a fast, cost-effective way to establish web presence and generate new revenue. While Infosis' products maintain the look-and-feel of the original publication, they also add web-based interactivity, adding value and enhancing the user-experience. Infosis' mission is to provide a cost-effective way for publishers, retailers and catalog companies to convert and deliver content electronically and make it profitable.

The Challenge
A core part of the Infosis solution is the extraction and re-purposing of content from digital pre-press files, often in PDF format. The high-volume, fast-turnaround production environment at Infosis requires an efficient PDF datamining tool. Moreover, because of the rich graphical layouts of many print products, Infosis required a cost-effective data extraction tool that would allow them to graphically define regions on the surface of a page, extracting the content just from that region.

BCL's Solution
To help Infosis accomplish this, BCL designed a customized version of its own Jade software. Designed to extract text, tabular data, and graphics from PDF files for editing and manipulation in other applications such as Microsoft® Word®, Excel®, and Adobe® Photoshop®, Jade uses a unique zoning feature to target data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, while also leaving behind superfluous data that would be unnecessarily extracted by a general document conversion program. The application customized for Infosis allows the corporation to use Jade's zoning capabilities to extract each piece of content (including graphics) as an individual graphic and place it into the appropriate directory for datamining purposes. As with Thomson Financial, BCL has continuously worked with key Infosis personnel to improve access to the advertising databases it provides for its clients.

Contact information for Infosis 617-691-5300, www.infosiscorp.com