2.90:Data Section (Node Type)

Data Sections are Data Elements of a Data Model. They allow a document's content to be subdivided into smaller portions (or "sections") for further processing, yielding the extraction process higher efficiency and accuracy.

Often, they are used to extract repeating sections of a document. For example, if a document had several sections of data for different customers, a Data Section could be used to pull data for each customer. This is especially useful for situations where the data within the section is predictable, but the number of sections in the document is not (i.e. if one document has one customer's data listed but the next has five, the next has two, and so on and so on).

Data Sections can also be used to:

Organize data from complex documents
Make a hierarchical representation of a document's structure, or
Reorder content from multiple columns on a page.

Data Sections may have, as its children:

Data Fields
Data Tables
Their own Data Sections

About

Sometimes a Data Field by itself just doesn't cut it when it comes time to extract data. Data Fields are the smallest building blocks of your Data Models. They are designed to return a single piece of data. For example, a most report stlye documents will have a single date the report was made. A single "Report Date" Data Field is well suited for this data.

However, what about repeated data across a single document? Say you have a document like this one. This is a standard reporting form oil and gas companies have to fill out and return to the Oklahoma Tax Commission for wells in production. One piece of information one might want to extract is the "Production Unit Number", which is essentially a tracking number relating to an oil and gas lease. But, there's not just one "Production Unit Number". There are five different ones. There's actually a set of information repeated in the sections of the document labeled "A", "B", "C" and so on.

It would be cumbersome to create five sets of Data Fields for each piece of data in each section.

Furthermore, for more unstructured or semi-structured documents, you may not reliably know how many sections are present per document. There might be one. There might be twenty. There could be variations of this form that have an "F", "G", and "H" section, for example. If you can't predict the number of Data Fields, how are you going to include them all in your Data Model?

This is exactly what Data Sections are for! Data Sections allow you to divide a document's content into smaller sections for further processing.

With a Data Section you can target these repeating portions of a document, creating five distinct sections out of them.

Then, all you need is a single Data Field for the repeating value you want to extract from each section.

Data Sections subdivide the larger document into smaller data instances.