Automate your Data Extraction for Oil Well Data with Amazon Textract

Traditionally, many businesses archive physical formats of their business documents. These can be invoices, sales memos, purchase orders, vendor-related documents, and inventory documents. As more and more businesses are moving towards digitizing their business processes, it is becoming challenging to effectively manage these documents and perform business analytics on them. For example, in the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry, companies have numerous documents that are generated through the exploration and production lifecycle of an oil well. These documents can provide many insights that can help inform business decisions.

As documents are usually stored in a paper format, information retrieval can be time consuming and cumbersome. Even those available in a digital format may not have adequate metadata associated to efficiently perform search and build insights.

In this post, you will learn how to build a text extraction solution using Amazon Textract service. This will automatically extract text and data from scanned documents and upload into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). We will show you how to find insights and relationships in the extracted text using Amazon Comprehend. This data is indexed and populated into Amazon OpenSearch Service to search and visualize it in a Kibana dashboard.

Figure 1 illustrates a solution built with AWS, which extracts O&G well data information from PDF documents. This solution is serverless and built using AWS Managed Services. This will help you to decrease system maintenance overhead while making your solution scalable and reliable.

Figure 1. Automated form data extraction architecture

Following are the high-level steps:

1. Upload an image file or PDF document to Amazon S3 for analysis. Amazon S3 is a durable document storage used for central document management.
2. Amazon S3 event initiates the AWS Lambda function Fn-A. AWS Lambda has functional logic to call the Amazon Textract and Comprehend services and processing.
3. AWS Lambda function Fn-A invokes Amazon Textract to extract text as key-value pairs from image or PDF. Amazon Textract automatically extracts data from the scanned documents.
4. Amazon Textract sends the extracted keys from image/PDF to Amazon SNS.
5. Amazon SNS notifies Amazon SQS when text extraction is complete by sending the extracted keys to Amazon SQS.
6. Amazon SQS initiates AWS Lambda function Fn-B with the extracted keys.
7. AWS Lambda function Fn-B invokes Amazon Comprehend for the custom entity recognition. Comprehend uses custom-trained machine learning (ML) to find discrepancies in key names from Amazon Textract.
8. The data is indexed and loaded into Amazon OpenSearch, which indexes and visualizes the data.
9. Kibana processes the indexed data.
10. User accesses Kibana to search documents.

Steps illustrated with more detail:

1. User uploads the document for analysis to Amazon S3. Uploaded document can be an image file or a PDF. Here we are using the S3 console for document upload. Figure 2 shows the sample file used for this demo.

Figure 2. Sample input form

2. Amazon S3 upload event initiates AWS Lambda function Fn-A. Refer to the AWS tutorial to learn about S3 Lambda configuration. View Sample code for Lambda FunctionA.

3. AWS Lambda function Fn-A invokes Amazon Textract. Amazon Textract uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read as a human would, by extracting text, layouts, tables, forms, and structured data with context and without configuration, training, or custom code.

4. Amazon Textract starts processing the file as it is uploaded. This process takes few minutes since the file is a multipage document.

5. Amazon SNS notifies Amazon Textract of completion. Amazon Textract processing works asynchronously, as we decouple our architecture using Amazon SQS. To configure Amazon SNS to send data to Amazon SQS:

• Create an SNS topic. ‘AmazonTextract-SNS’ is the SNS topic that we created for this demo.
• Then create an SQS queue. ‘AmazonTextract-SQS’ is the queue that we created for this demo.
• To receive messages published to a topic, you must subscribe an endpoint to the topic. When you subscribe an endpoint to a topic, the endpoint begins to receive messages published to the associated topic. Figure 3 shows the SNS topic ‘AmazonTextract-SNS’ subscribed to Amazon SQS queue.

Figure 3. Amazon SNS configuration

Figure 4. Amazon SQS configuration

6. Configure SQS queue to initiate the AWS Lambda function Fn-B. This should happen upon receiving extracted data via SNS topic. Refer to this SQS tutorial to learn about SQS Lambda configuration. See Sample code for Lambda FunctionB.

7. AWS Lambda function Fn-B invokes Amazon Comprehend for the custom entity recognition.

Figure 5. Lambda FunctionB configuration in Amazon Comprehend

• Configure Amazon Comprehend to create a custom entity recognition (text-job2) for the entities. These can be API Number, Lease_Number, Water_Depth, Well_Number, and can use the model created in previous step (well_no, well#, well num). For instructions on labeling your data, see Developing NER models with Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Comprehend.

Figure 6. Comprehend job

• Now create an endpoint for the custom entity recognition for the Lambda function, to send the data to Amazon Comprehend service, as shown in Figure 7 and 8.

Figure 7. Comprehend endpoint creation

• Copy the Amazon Comprehend endpoint ARN to include it in the Lambda function as an environment variable (see Figure 5).

Figure 8. Comprehend endpoint created successfully

8. Launch an Amazon OpenSearch domain. See Creating and managing Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. The data is indexed and populated into Amazon OpenSearch. The Amazon OpenSearch domain name is configured at Lambda FnB as an environment variable to push the extracted data to OpenSearch.

9. Kibana processes the indexed data from Amazon OpenSearch. Amazon OpenSearch data is populated on Kibana, shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Kibana dashboard showing Amazon OpenSearch data

10. Access Kibana for document search. The selected fields can be viewed as a table using filters, see Figure 10.

Figure 10. Kibana dashboard table view for selected fields

You can s­earch the LEASE_NUMBER = OCS-031, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. Kibana dashboard search on Lease Number

OR you can search all the information for the WATER_DEPTH = 60, see Figure 12.

Figure 12. Kibana dashboard search on Water Depth

Cleanup

1. Shut down OpenSearch domain
2. Delete the Comprehend endpoint
3. Clear objects from S3 bucket

Conclusion

Data is growing at an enormous pace in all industries. As we have shown, you can build an ML-based text extraction solution to uncover the unstructured data from PDFs or images. You can derive intelligence from diverse data sources by incorporating a data extraction and optimization function. You can gain insights into the undiscovered data, by leveraging managed ML services, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Comprehend.

The extracted data from PDFs or images is indexed and populated into Amazon OpenSearch. You can use Kibana to search and visualize the data. By implementing this solution, customers can reduce the costs of physical document storage, in addition to labor costs for manually identifying relevant information.

This solution will drive decision-making efficiency. We discussed the oil and gas industry vertical as an example for this blog. But this solution can be applied to any industry that has physical/scanned documents such as legal documents, purchase receipts, inventory reports, invoices, and purchase orders.

For further reading:

• Blog: Extracting custom entities from documents with Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend
• Blog: Extract entities from insurance documents using Amazon Comprehend named entity recognition