Methods and apparatus for print scraping

This invention relates generally to electronic exchange of information and, more particularly, to extracting information from a document provided in electronic form. Systems and processes that automate receiving of unstructured information contained in electronic documents, detecting the document type, determining the corresponding document format, extracting structured information from the source document, and populating an information store with the extracted information for analysis purpose, are described. Generally, the electronic documents are pre-characterized and the extraction and mapping/translation details are developed as scripts on a per document type basis. These extraction and mapping/translation scripts are then automatically selected and used to automatically drive the subsequent information extraction processes.