S2Doc -- Spatial-Semantic Document Format

TL;DR

S2Doc is a novel, flexible data structure that unifies spatial and semantic information for modeling documents and tables, supporting multi-page documents and various approaches.

Contribution

It introduces the first comprehensive format combining spatial and semantic aspects for documents and tables, enhancing standardization and extendability.

Findings

Supports most modeling approaches for documents and tables

Enables multi-page document representation

Facilitates interoperability between different data structures

Abstract

Documents are a common way to store and share information, with tables being an important part of many documents. However, there is no real common understanding of how to model documents and tables in particular. Because of this lack of standardization, most scientific approaches have their own way of modeling documents and tables, leading to a variety of different data structures and formats that are not directly compatible. Furthermore, most data models focus on either the spatial or the semantic structure of a document, neglecting the other aspect. To address this, we developed S2Doc, a flexible data structure for modeling documents and tables that combines both spatial and semantic information in a single format. It is designed to be easily extendable to new tasks and supports most modeling approaches for documents and tables, including multi-page documents. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first approach of its kind to combine all these aspects in a single format.