AtoM Heratio
Version: 2.8.2
Developer: The Archive and Heritage Group (Pty) Ltd
Website: https://theahg.co.za
Contact: johan@theahg.co.za
About
AtoM Heratio is a comprehensive modernization of Access to Memory (AtoM) for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Digital Asset Management institutions (GLAM/DAM). Heratio is a fully modern Laravel-based framework, 79 specialized plugins, and integrated AI capabilities — delivering an enterprise-grade archival management system.
Developed by The Archive and Heritage Group (Pty) Ltd, South Africa.
AI & Machine Learning Components
AtoM Heratio integrates the following open-source AI and machine learning technologies:
Natural Language Processing
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| spaCy |
3.x |
Named Entity Recognition (NER) — persons, organizations, places, dates |
MIT |
| en_core_web_sm |
3.x |
English NER language model |
MIT |
| Hugging Face Transformers |
4.x |
Model loading and inference framework |
Apache 2.0 |
| facebook/bart-large-cnn |
- |
Document summarization |
MIT |
| sentence-transformers |
2.x |
Semantic search and text embeddings |
Apache 2.0 |
Translation
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| Argos Translate |
1.x |
Offline machine translation |
MIT |
| Argos Language Packages |
- |
Language pair models (EN, AF, ZU, FR, DE, PT, ES) |
MIT |
Optical Character Recognition
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| Tesseract OCR |
5.x |
Text recognition from images and scanned documents |
Apache 2.0 |
| pytesseract |
0.3.x |
Python wrapper for Tesseract |
Apache 2.0 |
Handwritten Text Recognition
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| TrOCR (microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten) |
- |
Handwritten text recognition |
MIT |
Computer Vision
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| YOLO-NAS |
- |
Face detection and object recognition |
Apache 2.0 |
| OpenCV |
4.x |
Image processing and computer vision |
Apache 2.0 |
| Pillow (PIL) |
10.x |
Image manipulation |
HPND (permissive) |
Document Processing
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| pdfminer.six |
2026.x |
PDF text extraction |
MIT |
| pdf2image |
1.x |
PDF to image conversion for OCR |
MIT |
| Poppler |
- |
PDF rendering backend |
GPL-2.0 (system utility) |
Spell Checking
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| GNU Aspell |
0.60.x |
Spelling and grammar checking |
LGPL-2.1 |
LLM Integration
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| Ollama |
0.x |
Local LLM inference server |
MIT |
| Mistral 7B |
- |
AI-powered description suggestions |
Apache 2.0 |
Search & Discovery
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| Elasticsearch |
7.x |
Full-text search and indexing |
Elastic License 2.0 / SSPL |
| NLTK |
3.x |
Natural language toolkit — tokenization, WordNet |
Apache 2.0 |
Digital Preservation
| Component |
Version |
Purpose |
License |
| Siegfried |
1.x |
File format identification (PRONOM registry) |
Apache 2.0 |
| ClamAV |
1.x |
Virus and malware scanning |
GPL-2.0 (system utility) |
Core Technology Stack
| Component |
Purpose |
License |
| AtoM 2.10 |
Base archival management platform |
AGPL-3.0 |
| PHP 8.3 |
Server-side runtime |
PHP License |
| Laravel Illuminate |
Database, views, events framework |
MIT |
| Symfony 1.4 |
Legacy MVC framework (AtoM base) |
MIT |
| MySQL 8 |
Relational database |
GPL-2.0 |
| Nginx |
Web server |
BSD-2-Clause |
| Python 3.12 |
AI/ML service runtime |
PSF License |
| Flask |
AI API microservice framework |
BSD-3-Clause |
| Node.js |
Build tools and client JavaScript |
MIT |
| Bootstrap 5 |
UI framework |
MIT |
IIIF & Media
| Component |
Purpose |
License |
| OpenSeadragon |
Deep zoom image viewer |
BSD-3-Clause |
| Mirador |
Multi-image IIIF comparison viewer |
Apache 2.0 |
| Cantaloupe |
IIIF image tile server |
BSD-like |
| Google Model Viewer |
3D model and AR viewer |
Apache 2.0 |
| WaveSurfer.js |
Audio waveform visualization |
BSD-3-Clause |
Standards Compliance
AtoM Heratio supports the following archival and metadata standards:
- ISAD(G) — General International Standard Archival Description
- ISAAR(CPF) — International Standard Archival Authority Record
- ISDF — International Standard for Describing Functions
- DACS — Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- RAD — Rules for Archival Description
- Dublin Core — Dublin Core Metadata Element Set
- MODS — Metadata Object Description Schema
- EAD — Encoded Archival Description
- PREMIS — Preservation Metadata
- IIIF — International Image Interoperability Framework
- OAIS — Open Archival Information System
- Spectrum 5.1 — UK Collections Trust Standard
- GRAP 103 / IPSAS 45 — Heritage Asset Accounting
- RiC — Records in Contexts (ICA)
Regulatory Compliance Modules
| Module |
Jurisdiction |
| POPIA / PAIA |
South Africa |
| GDPR |
European Union |
| UK GDPR |
United Kingdom |
| CCPA |
California, USA |
| PIPEDA |
Canada |
| NDPA (Nigeria) |
Nigeria |
| DPA (Kenya) |
Kenya |
| CDPA |
Zimbabwe |
| NAZ Act |
Zimbabwe |
| NMMZ Act |
Zimbabwe |
| NARSSA |
South Africa |
Credits
AtoM Heratio is built upon the work of many open-source communities. We gratefully acknowledge:
- Artefactual Systems — Access to Memory (AtoM) base platform
- Hugging Face — Transformers library and model hosting
- Explosion AI — spaCy NLP framework
- Argos Open Technologies — Argos Translate
- Google / Apache — TensorFlow, Model Viewer
- Tesseract OCR contributors — OCR engine
- Microsoft Research — TrOCR handwritten text recognition
- Meta AI Research — BART summarization model
- Deci AI — YOLO-NAS object detection
- OpenCV community — Computer vision library
- Elastic — Elasticsearch
- Laravel community — Illuminate components
- The broader open-source community — Without whom none of this would be possible
Copyright (c) 2023-2026 The Archive and Heritage Group (Pty) Ltd.
AtoM Heratio is free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). You may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the AGPL as published by the Free Software Foundation.
AtoM Heratio is built on Access to Memory (AtoM), also licensed under AGPL-3.0 by Artefactual Systems.
