How Can Standards and Code Development Organizations Navigate the Code Conversion Minefield?

Most industries today such as banking, finance, retail, IT, have been quick to jump on the digital bandwagon to reap the immense benefits of digitization. Such has been the impact of digitization of the enterprise that even industries that managed to remain aloof from this drive such as pharma and healthcare are now adopting digital initiatives at an accelerated pace.

It is hardly a surprise then, that the Standards Development Organizations across the globe no longer remain indifferent to the digital movement. Since Standards Development Organizations or SDOs are entities that are engaged in activities of “developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise maintaining hundreds of thousands of standards applicable to a wide base of users outside the standards developing organization”, digitization initiatives demand a lot of technical work. Since these standards can consist of rules, best practices specifications, design and installation processes, guidelines etc. one of the key aspects to take into consideration is reliable code conversion.

The Challenges of Reliable Code Conversion

SDOs embarking on the digital initiative have to first address the challenge of legacy data. Most of the SDO information is in the form of PDF’s, research papers, journals, textbooks, complex books, standards and code for various industries and other hard copy formats that need to be accurately converted to digital text. Digitizing this data with 100% accuracy can be a challenge as it has to be ensured that the relevance of the content does not get compromised during the digitization processes. Additionally, given that most SDOs keep adding new data to the standards that have been developed it has to be ensured that not only is the latest data but also the old data is converted capably and accurately. During the code conversion process, it is essential to ensure that the standard codes are displayed according to chapter, the navigation is easy, copy and paste options are provided, option for color coding content to identify editing and relocation is provided etc. While most of this can be done with the help of a code conversion tool, it can be hard to guarantee that this code conversion is 100% accurate.

Challenges in Code Conversion for Mathematical Equations

The other challenge during the code conversion process emerges for those SDOs who publish codes, standards, and documents that weigh heavily with mathematical formulas and equations. Often these equations are captured as an image and then published in the digital document. However, these images cannot be edited and in the event that such an image needs a rework, the publisher has to create a new image. This can be resource and time intensive and also impact the quality of the image.

What’s the Solution?

The first thing that SDOs need is a comprehensive code conversion tool that reduces the amount of manual intervention for the accuracy of the converted code. We, at InfoBeans, have developed a solution that addresses the code conversion challenges for SDOs and helps them increase the accuracy of their code to 100%. With the InfoBeans conversion solution, converting complex data formats can be achieved easily through automated processing and digitization that provide unambiguous conversions and reduce the amount of manual intervention usually needed for these tasks. With this solution SDOs can:

• Achieve efficient integration by tagging at the content level

• Include internal and external references for conversions

• Achieve up to 10,000-page conversions per week

• Extract and populate databases, eCommerce platforms and backend systems

• Efficiently convert legacy data

• Achieve 100% content accuracy

Along with this, our expertise with MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) helps us in accurately converting the mathematical and scientific content on digital platforms. Using MathML, SDOs can insert math equations in HTML. This allows for easy positioning, searchability, accessibility, and editing of these equations. MathML also contains a number of XML tags that can be used to mark up an equation in terms of its presentation and also its semantics. Further, MathML helps SDOs capture the meanings of the syntax used in the equation and also helps with the formatting of the equation.

Strong Verification = Data Accuracy

The InfoBeans, we employ a very strong verification process in code conversion. The converted content/data/style is verified to match with the source and proofread minutely to ensure zero error. Using automated scripts this content is then verified for text, style and data accuracy. Finally, a manual review of the converted material is executed to correct any structural or formatting issues.

The InfoBeans code conversion services is like a one stop shop for all SDOs looking at digitizing their initiatives. We help SDOs convert data easily from different formats such as XML, Word, ePub, HTML with a fast turn around time in terms of conversion and proofreading. We help them convert data from any hard copy source such as hard prints, PDF and electronic sources to digital formats easily, and make data available on multiple devices. The use of automation ensures reduced manual errors during the conversion process. Our robust quality checking and management capabilities ensure 100% code conversion accuracy.

Our experience in this domain gives us the ability to position ourselves as a technology partner to SDOs who makes navigating the digital minefield less complex and time and resource efficient.

Connect with us to know more about our Data and Document Conversion Services.