Support conversion of JATS format into DoclingDocument

[ceberam]

Requested feature

The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) format is a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content. The JATS provides a set of XML elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.

Several publishers distribute documents in a structured XML format according to JATS, including PubMed Central, pre-print repositories such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, and journals in PLOS.

Currently, docling supports the conversion of PubMed Central articles, as described in the Supported formats section, but it may need to be refactored to generalize to other JATS articles and the current standard 1.4.

The feature request is about extending docling conversion to any structured document in JATS format, for instance, by generalizing the current backend conversion of PubMed Central documents.

Alternatives

Since a JATS parsing implementation in docling already exists, there is no alternative with lower effort