Tika is a content analysis toolkit and Java library designed for detecting and extracting metadata and text from thousands of different file types. It functions as a universal document text extractor and metadata extraction engine, converting complex files into plain text or XHTML.
The system employs a specialized MIME type detector that identifies document formats using magic bytes and metadata to determine the correct parser. It serves as an OCR integration gateway, connecting to external text recognition tools to extract content from image files.
The project covers a broad range of extraction and analysis capabilities, including digital asset metadata retrieval, email archive processing for formats like PST and mbox, and natural language detection. It further supports automated document parsing, recursive archive unpacking, and text content analysis through integrations for sentiment classification and named entity recognition.
