The Rationale of this project is to simplify and automate the mundane task of data entry. Using Python I am designing a script that will take .pdf files (because of the roadblocks I've had, tabular and scanned), and convert them into well organized .json files. These files can then be implemented into a pre-existing or newly created database, such as MongoDB or PostGreSQL, with ease. This will allow this data to be easily retrieved, checked and make inventory of product in a lab a cinch.
There seem to be more roadblocks than there is progress at this point. However, progress is being made. The biggest roadblock was when I found out that most of the .pdf's that we recieve in our lab are just scanned images converted into a .pdf. This means there is no tabular data that I can simply extract from the metadata. Instead, I have decided to use Google's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Tesseract to check the image for recognizable words, this requires a conversion back to a .jpg so that most of pythons wrappers for Tesseract can read the image. This will extract a string of data in a list, which can then be split by the spaces and the JSON dictionary can be created.