ApacheCon EU 2014

If you have one or two files, you can take the time to manually work out what they are, what they contain, and how to get the useful bits out (probably....). However, this approach really doesn't scale, mechanical turks or no! Luckily, there are Apache projects out there which can help!

In this talk, we'll first look at how we can work out what a given blob of 1s and 0s actually is, be it textual or binary. We'll then see how to extract common metadata from it, along with text, embedded resources, images, and maybe even the kitchen sink! We'll see how to do all of this with Apache Tika, and how to dive down to the underlying libraries (including its Apache friends like POI and PDFBox) for specialist cases. Finally, we'll look a little bit about how to roll this all out on a Big Data or Large-Search case.