1. A method for extracting and processing data from an electronic document, the method comprising the steps of: (a) providing a data acquisition engine and a processing engine, wherein the data acquisition engine is capable of extracting data from the electronic document, which data comprises glyphs and at least one property spatially associated with the glyphs, and wherein said at least one property is selected from the group consisting of location, font, background, and shading graphical element; and (b) providing said processing engine with a plurality of rules and a backward tracking search algorithm, wherein the plurality of rules are provided with a hierarchy and the rules are applied in the order of the hierarchy, wherein at least one of the plurality of rules defines an anchor point, which anchor point comprises glyphs having a defined format, and wherein at least some of the plurality of rules describe the relationship between the extracted data and the at least one property; wherein said processing engine is capable of providing a data output having a defined format, and wherein in use, the processing engine analyses the extracted data by applying the plurality of rules upon the anchor point to determine the probability of whether the property and extracted data meet the requirements of the rules, such that the processing engine determines the best fit of the extracted data to the format of the data output and produces the data output, wherein the method allows a plurality of anchor points to be defined by the plurality of rules.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the defined format comprises XML data format and the rules provide for a plurality of data tags, the processing engine being adapted to apply the tags to the extracted data in accordance with the rules.