Results
By carefully specifying the desired information, we are able to generate a standardised database of Planning Applications from previously unstructured and inconsistent documents. The resultant database features information pertaining to an Application, such as reference numbers, dates, parties involved etc., but also a summary of the longer prose from the document. For example, if a Planning Officer gives a detailed breakdown of the reasons behind their decision, we can categorise the reason into a word or two for easier analysis. The well-curated database would take thousands of hours for a human to collate manually (if it was at all possible), and with more than 1,000 new Applications submitted each day on average, any effort would quickly become obsolete. Instead, our AI-enabled solution is able to ingest documents, quickly retrieve the desired information and reflect that back in the database almost instantly (1 document ≈ 10 seconds to ingest).