| Tika | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Apache Software Foundation |
| Stable release | 3.2.3[1] 
/ 9 September 2025 |
| Written in | Java |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Search and index API |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Website | tika |
| Repository | Tika Repository |
Apache Tika is a content detection and analysis framework, written in Java, stewarded at the Apache Software Foundation.[2] It detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types, and as well as providing a Java library, has server and command-line editions suitable for use from other programming languages.
History
editThe project originated as part of the Apache Nutch codebase, to provide content identification and extraction when crawling. In 2007, it was separated out, to make it more extensible and usable by content management systems, other Web crawlers, and information retrieval systems. The standalone Tika was founded by Jérôme Charron, Chris Mattmann and Jukka Zitting.[3] In 2011 Chris Mattmann and Jukka Zitting released the Manning book "Tika in Action", and the project released version 1.0.
Features
editTika provides capabilities for identification of more than 1400 file types from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority taxonomy of MIME types. For most of the more common and popular formats,[4] Tika then provides content extraction, metadata extraction and language identification capabilities.
It can also get text from images by using the OCR software Tesseract.[5]
While Tika is written in Java, it is widely used from other languages.[6] The RESTful server and CLI Tool permit non-Java programs to access the Tika functionality.
Notable uses
editTika is used by financial institutions including the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO),[7] Goldman Sachs,[8] NASA and academic researchers[9] and by major content management systems including Drupal,[10] and Alfresco (software)[11] to analyze large amounts of content, and to make it available in common formats using information retrieval techniques.
On April 4, 2016[12] Forbes published an article identifying Tika as one of the key technologies used by more than 400 journalists to analyze 11.5 million leaked documents that expose an international scandal involving world leaders storing money in offshore shell corporations. The leaked documents and the project to analyze them is referred to as the Panama Papers.
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tika/3.2.3/CHANGES-3.2.3.txt. Retrieved 22 February 2026.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ "Apache Tika". Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ "Tika Proposal". Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ "The Apache Software Foundation". Apache Tika formats page. Retrieved 16 April 2016.
- ^ "TikaOCR". Apache Tika. 2019-03-26. Retrieved 2019-12-02.
- ^ "API Bindings for Tika". Apache Tika. Retrieved 2016-04-17.
- ^ "FICO to Engage Kaggle's Community of 180,000 Data Scientists to Drive Innovation in the FICO Analytic Cloud | FICO". FICO | Decisions. Archived from the original on 2016-06-03. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ "Goldman Sachs Puts Elasticsearch To Work - InformationWeek". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2017-06-21.
- ^ "Studying polar data with the help of Apache Tika". Opensource.com. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ "Text Extract for Drupal using Tika | Drupal.org". www.drupal.org. 30 July 2012. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ "Content Transformation and Metadata Extraction with Apache Tika - alfrescowiki". wiki.alfresco.com. 5 June 2015. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
- ^ Fox-Brewster, Thomas. "From Encrypted Drives To Amazon's Cloud -- The Amazing Flight Of The Panama Papers". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-04-15.
