Development of Scientific Figure Parser

The Aalto Datahub (AUDH) is taking part in a University of Helsinki software development course as a customer, commissioning the development of an open source tool that parses scientific figures into structured data. Six Computer Science students will work on the project over the summer, independently developing a product that meets the requirements we set out as the customer.

Reliably turning large quantities of unstructured data accross different file types into structured data is a non-trivial task. One key challenge is making use of the graphic data contained in those documents. High-quality, reproducible graph-to-data pipelines open up new, cost-effective avenues of research in behavioral finance and behavioral economics, as well as in many other fields where the completeness of the information held in a document matters.

The tool is being developed in collaboration with the research group of Professor Juha Joenväärä (Department of Finance, Aalto University). Once complete, the parser will be used in Professor Joenväärä's research alongside other Aalto finance researchers. We further hope the tool will prove useful across a wide range of other fields and research projects.

By supporting the development of this parser as an open source tool, the Aalto Datahub aims to make these pipelines accessible to researchers at Aalto University as well as the wider research community.