Annotation and Extraction of Industrial Procedural Knowledge from Textual Documents

The ability to extract valuable information from documents and convert it into knowledge is crucial for driving technological innovation across industries. While adding metadata to manuals enhances their searchability, the real knowledge is still hidden in the procedural information they contain, which offers vital guidance for operators. Therefore, the approach of extracting and transforming unstructured human-readable information into machine-interpretable data is fundamental for establishing cutting-edge digital knowledge-based platforms. This paper presents a methodology tailored to the specific requirements of users who are seeking support in extracting and representing procedural knowledge from documents. We introduce a tool designed to support users in manually annotating procedures within PDF documents and generating a corresponding procedural knowledge graph. We assess the tool in real-world scenarios, aimed at evaluating its effectiveness in accomplishing various tasks. Finally, we generate a procedural knowledge graph that can facilitate knowledge discovery.