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Ruben Verborgh

Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information

Ben De Meester, Tom De Nies, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens, and Rik Van de Walle

Digital publications can be packaged, distributed, and viewed via the Open Web Platform using the EPUB 3 format. Meanwhile, the increased amount of mobile clients and the advent of HTML5’s Geolocation have opened a whole range of possibilities for digital publications to interact with their readers. However, EPUB3 files often remain closed silos of information, no longer linked with the rest of the Web. In this paper, we propose a solution that addresses the difficulties of reconnecting digital publications with the Web using the spatial location of the concepts mentioned in the publication. We enrich digital publications by connecting the detected concepts to their URIs on, e.g., DBpedia, and use an algorithm that uses these URIs to retrieve or approximate the coordinates of these concepts. The evaluation of the approximation algorithm showed that almost any concept can be linked to a coordinate, but that the errors can be very high when context information is limited. This means relevant locations for a user can be shown, based on the content he or she is reading, and based on his or her location. This methodology can be used to reconnect digital publications with the online world, to entice readers, and ultimately, as a novel location-based recommendation technique.

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Published in 2015 in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{demeester_locweb_2015,
  author = {De Meester, Ben and De Nies, Tom and Verborgh, Ruben and Mannens, Erik and Van de Walle, Rik},
  title = {Reconnecting Digital Publications to the {Web} using their Spatial Information},
  year = 2015,
  month = may,
  pages = {749--754},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web},
  url = {http://www.www2015.it/documents/proceedings/companion/p749.pdf},
}

Alternatively, pick a reference of your choice below:

ACM
Ben De Meester, Tom De Nies, Ruben Verborgh, Erik Mannens, and Rik Van de Walle. 2015. Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web, 749–754.
APA
De Meester, B., De Nies, T., Verborgh, R., Mannens, E., & Van de Walle, R. (2015). Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web, 749–754.
IEEE
B. De Meester, T. De Nies, R. Verborgh, E. Mannens, and R. Van de Walle, “Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information,” in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web, 2015, pp. 749–754.
LNCS
De Meester, B., De Nies, T., Verborgh, R., Mannens, E., Van de Walle, R.: Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web using their Spatial Information. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web. pp. 749–754 (2015).
MLA
De Meester, Ben, et al. “Reconnecting Digital Publications to the Web Using Their Spatial Information.” Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Location and the Web, 2015, pp. 749–54.

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