Closing in on the third millennium with the proper informational infrastructure is one of the great challenges of today`s global community. When Turkey, as other member nations of the UN, was faced with the membership requirement of performing a National Population Survey, the Prime Ministry and the State Institute of Statistics understood the grand scope of the mission before them. Since such surveys play an uncompromisingly important role in supplying the vital data required to secure such an infrastructure, the need arose for a cost-effective and time- saving solution for processing Turkey`s 15,000,000 national census forms.
November 30, 1997, a national curfew was implemented from midnight Saturday until Sunday at 17:00. During this time 600 000 teachers dispersed throughout the many provinces, sub-provinces and villages of Turkey to distribute the census form, to complete the empty data fields, and to return the completed forms to the regional manager, who, thereafter, ensured delivery to Turkey`s State Institute of Statistics (SIS).
Thus, SIS succeeded in facing up to the logistical challenge of such a colossal data collection assignment. Next at hand was the task of taking the data contained in the forms and transforming it into applicable, assessable and presentable statistical information.
After more than a year of searching, weeks of bidding by companies from around the globe, and a rigorous competition during the performance benchmark, Turkey`s SIS assigned this essential task to the bilateral team of Israel`s TiS - Top Image Systems, a recognised world leader in forms processing software development, and its local partner in Turkey, DataSel, a subsidiary of the major Turkish conglomerate YUKSEL headquartered in Ankara.
With relentless determination to overcome time and other conventional limitations, TiS and Datasel combined their forces and achieved unprecedented results. In a fortnight DataSel constructed the entire facility to house project processes, obtained all the necessary furniture and equipment, and recruited and trained over 600 personnel to participate in processing the data of 15 million census forms.
TiS, on the other hand, supplied its cost-effective, time-saving AFPSPro automated forms processing software solution, which won the International Information Management Congress (IMC) 1997 Software Award of Excellence. AFPSPro, along with certain hardware, is automating the processing of seemingly insurmountable masses of data contained in tens of millions of forms, and constituting billions upon billions of characters.
The system designed by TiS for the special needs of the Turkish Census Project includes:
- The high-performance Kodak 9500 scanner and scanning control software;
- AFPSPro`s controlling tool to monitor the high volume of batches being transferred through the system;
- A powerful statistics application which enables high-level ICR training to handle the Turkish alphabet which consists of characters previously untreated by any forms processing software; and
- Online quality assurance services.
The system comprises eight scanners where each scanner serves as the focal point for each of the corresponding eight segments of the system. Each segment comprises one Kodak scanner, an HP jukebox (holding 128 MOs, or 338GB of information), one supervision and 20 completion stations, constituting a 24-hour-pe- day work cycle for the project.
After the scanning phase, AFPSPro, a state-of-the art forms processing application generator, reads, processes, stores and retrieves the information contained on the census forms. Salient features include multiple OCR/ICR/OMR recognition engines; sophisticated voting algorithms for weighting recognition engine results; and TiS`s proprietary tools FormOut! and AfterScan (for form recognition and removal, and image enhancement, respectively).
Consequently, TiS and Datasel have cut significantly the time and cost demands regularly presented by an endeavour of such massive proportions, as well as having enabled the rapid and accurate handling of over 600 000 forms per day.
Thanks to advances in information technology and their manifestation in TiS` industry leading AFPSPro, the initial phases of Turkey`s National Census Project, the successful dissemination, completion, collection and processing of nearly 20 million forms, were achieved with unrivalled accuracy and efficiency.
TiS products are distributed in South Africa by Exsol, a company in the MGX Holdings group.
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