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ASF Project Spotlight: Apache Tika  

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Can you tell us a bit about the project?  
Apache Tika is an open source content detection and analysis framework written in Java. It detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types. In addition to providing a Java library, Tika has server and command-line editions suitable for use from other programming languages.

When was the project started and why? 
Originally part of the Apache Nutch codebase,Tika was developed to enable content identification and extraction during web crawling. In 2007 Tika was separated into a standalone project to enhance its extensibility and usability, making it accessible to content management systems, other web crawlers, and information retrieval systems.

Who is your audience, and what key features of the technology do you believe will excite people? 
Tika is utilized by various financial institutions such as the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) and Goldman Sachs, as well as by NASA, academic researchers, and major content management systems like Drupal and Alfresco. 

Tika supports more than a thousand file formats, ranging from PDFs and Office documents to audio files, images, and beyond. With a unified interface for parsing all these formats, Tika is highly valuable for tasks like search engine indexing, content analysis, translation, and more. In a world where the need to process large amounts of data is only growing, tools like Tika are becoming increasingly important. 

What technology problem is Tika solving?
Tika is a software library that has many purposes, including: 

  • Data processing: Tika is a key component in many data processing pipelines because it can process a wide range of file types. 
  • Search engine indexing: Tika can be used to parse file types for search engine indexing. 
  • Content analysis: Tika can be used to analyze content. 
  • Translation: Tika can be used for translation. 
  • Language identification: Tika can identify the language of a piece of text. 
  • Extracting text from images: Tika can extract text from images using the OCR software Tesseract. 

Why is this work important?
Tika has many valuable applications – from search engines to document analysis. Perhaps one of the most exciting applications would be Artificial Intelligence (AI). By making sense out of large amounts of data, regardless of its format, Tika helps make it possible for AI to process, translate, extract and analyze raw data into algorithms and meaningful patterns we can learn from. 

The ASF’s mission is to provide software for the public good. In what ways does your project embody the ASF mission and “community over code” ethos?
Tika was one of the challenge projects in the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a two-year contest that unites the best and brightest in AI and cybersecurity to safeguard critical software systems. Competitors are tasked to develop automated systems to find and propose fixes in large, real-world codebases. The ultimate goal of the AIxCC contest is to develop systems to help open source software (OSS) projects identify vulnerabilities without too much effort – using AI and traditional techniques such as fuzzing and static analysis to help improve the whole OSS ecosystem.

As a challenge project Tika was one of the code bases that competitors’ systems had to navigate, looking for the top 25 most dangerous software security weaknesses as identified by MITRE’s Common Weakness Enumeration team. Other challenge projects for AIxCC included nginx, the Linux kernel, SQLite and Jenkins.

As part of the competition, challenge developers injected nearly 60 synthetic vulnerabilities into offline, competition-hosted forks of the selected open source projects. The systems found more than a third of the injected vulnerabilities, and one system discovered a zero-day, a security vulnerability that was unknown to challenge developers.

Are there any use cases or recent milestones you would like to tell us about? 
Tika 2.9.2 was released in April, and Tika 3.0.0 BETA2 was released in July. Both releases included several bug fixes and dependency upgrades. 

What has been your experience growing the community? 
File processing is not glamorous, but our community includes people from a wide range of disciplines including enterprise search, e-discovery, file forensics and digital preservation, among others.

What’s the best way to learn about the project and try it out? 
Download the tika-app jar from the Downloads page, run it with `java -jar tika-app-X.Y.Z.jar` and drop a file in the GUI. To use Tika programmatically, this Getting Started document describes how to build Tika from sources and how to start using Tika in an application. Pay close attention and follow the instructions in the “Getting and building the sources” section.

How can others contribute to this project – code contributions being only one of the ways? 
Apache Tika is built and maintained by a diverse range of contributors. We welcome contributions of all types to the project – code, documentation, testing, bug triage, user support, and more. Send an email to the Tika development list [email protected] if you’re looking for somewhere to help.

What does the future hold for the project? 
We’re always on the look out to integrate parsers for new file formats, and we’re particularly excited by the revived interest in document understanding brought about by the AI revolution and the need to extract document structure with high precision. 

Additional Resources 

The ASF is home to nearly 9,000 committers contributing to more than 320 active projects including Apache Airflow, Apache Camel, Apache Flink, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Kafka, and Apache Superset. With the support of volunteers, developers, stewards, and more than 75 sponsors, ASF projects create open source software that is used ubiquitously around the world. This work helps us realize our mission of providing software for the public good.

In the midst of hosting community events, engaging in collaboration, producing code and so much more, we often forget to take a moment to recognize and adequately showcase the important work being done across the ASF ecosystem. This blog series aims to do just that: shine a spotlight on the projects that help make the ASF community vibrant, diverse and long lasting. We want to share stories, use cases and resources among the ASF community and beyond so that the hard work of ASF communities and their contributors is not overlooked. 

If you are part of an ASF project and would like to be showcased, please reach out to [email protected]. 

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