Document engineering is the area of knowledge concerned with principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, store, compact, access, and maintain documents. The fields of document recognition and retrieval have grown rapidly in recent years. Such development has been fueled by the emergence of new application areas such as the World Wide Web (WWW), digital libraries, and video- and camera-based OCR.

Jean-Marc Ogier received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Rouen, France, in 1994. During this period (1991-1994), he worked on graphic recognition for Matra Ms&I Company. From 1994 to 2000, he was an associate professor at the University of Rennes 1 during a first period (1994-1998) and at the University of Rouen from 1998 to 2001.

Now full professor at the university of la Rochelle, Pr Ogier is the head of URL laboratory which gathers more than 100 members and works mainly of Document Analysis and Content Management. Author of more than 160 publications / communications, he managed several French and European projects dealing with historical document analysis, either with public institutions, or with private companies.

Pr Ogier is a Deputy Director of the GDR I3 of the French National Research Centre (CNRS). He is also the french representative to the Governing board of the international Asssociation for Pattern Recognition (www.iapr.org), which gathers more than 10 000 researchers in the world. For this association he is also the general Chair of the Technical Committee 10 (Graphic Recognition). At last he is also Vice rector of the university of La Rochelle in charge of its digital policy.