About k5n EDocIAS

k5n EDocIAS is an open source PHP-based electronic document index and search system. It is not a document management system. With the proper 3rd party text extraction tools, you can easily search for text embedded in binary files (PDF, DOC, XLS, HTML, etc.) And, with the installation of Tesseract, any documents you have scanned (and saved as TIFF, JPEG or PNG) can also be searched.

Requirements

• PHP 5
• MySQL (other databases will likely work but not tested)
• 3rd party tools for extracting text (Tesseract, etc.) (See the README.txt file for a list of possible tools.)

Goals

It's important to keep in mind not only what this tool was designed for but also what it is not.

• Open source: GLP v2
• Multiplatform (Mac, Windows, Linux): Achieved by using PHP and MySQL.
• Simple: This is not a document management system with file management, user access control, etc. This is intended for users who already have a bunch of documents of various formats and just need to find a way to quickly search them from any machine on their network.
• Lean: Since this app may not be used for days at a time (depending on how it's being used), it should not require additional memory or CPU time while not in use. So, no standalone Java server for example.
• Accessible from the network: Even though all the files are centrally located on a single machine, you can search for and download the documents using the simple web interface. This makes all the documents instantly accessible to the other machines on your network. And no mounting of network drives is required.
• Don't reinvent the wheel: There are plenty of existing tools out there that will extract the plain text from binary data. So, there is no need to rewrite that functionality again. The document index process invokes 3rd party tools.
• Expandable: If you have files of a different type that you want to include, all you need to do is find or build a tool to extract the text you want to index. For example, find a tool to pull the metadata out of photos and index your pictures.
• Intranet-focused: Easily integrated into other PHP-based apps for use in an intranet. Custom header, trailer and CSS is easily configured.

See Plans to see what features will be added next.

SourceForge.net Services

Development resources from SourceForge.net are used in the development of this component. For a complete list, see the Developers page.