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Libraries

1. Software architecture

Our reference implementation for the PIISA specification has been developed as a set of Python packages:

  • pii-data is the foundational library, containing base data structures. It defines our abstraction for a document to be analyzed (Source Document) and the elements defining a PII instance.
  • pii-preprocess is the package in charge of reading different document formats into a Source Document, the standard representation defined by pii-data; as such it implements the Preprocess block in the PIISA architecture
  • pii-extract-base is the base package for the PII Detect block. It provides the infrastructure needed to extract PII instances from Source Documents. However, it does not implement any PII Detector itself, delegating that task to external libraries (attached via plugins or configuration files)
  • pii-extract-plg-regex is a pii-extract plugin that implements some PII Detectors for a number of tasks and languages, based on regular expressions (plus optional context validation and/or checksums)
  • pii-extract-plg-transformers is a pii-extract plugin that implements some PII Detectors by creating NER model pipelines running on the Hugging Face Transformers library.
  • pii-extract-plg-presidio is a pii-extract plugin that implements some PII Detectors by calling the Microsoft Presidio library.
  • pii-decide implements the Decision block
  • pii-transform implements the PII Transform block of the architecture: it takes a PII Collection created by pii-extract (and confirmed by pii-decide), and replaces/modifies the PII strings in the original Source Document.
  • pii-process provides some end-to-end API objects and command-line scripts.

For a brief initial tutorial for the packages, check out the usage document.

2. Source Document

The abstraction we use to manage original data to be processed is called Source Document. It is a simple representation of a document that contains:

  • a document header, containing some document-level metadata
  • a list of document chunks, each one containing a text block extracted from the document, plus some additional metadata

On top of this representation a few variants have been defined to carry some particular document structures: sequence, tree, table

Downstream tools (such as the ones in the pii-extract-base or pii-transform packages) can iterate over Source Documents, processing them chunk by chunk (they can also process single-chunk documents, for the case in which there is no structure to be used).