Digital Textbooks and Contextual Search

Digital Publishing Interest Group,

IMS Global Learning Consortium,




Some have envisioned interoperability between digital textbooks, scholarly and scientific documents and software such as Cortana, Google Now or Siri.  I would like to present the exciting feature of users asking questions while utilizing digital textbooks or scholarly and scientific publications.  I would like to present the recent developments of Bing Snapshots (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=384xrKf6s98) and Google Now on Tap (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM7m7dyiDPc).




Thus far, the features work by traversing applications’ user interface trees or layout trees.  The traversal extends into applications’ document trees or document layout trees.  Document semantics are then topical to providing topic or context data to such software.  How can applications or documents enhance the quality of the contexts gleaned or of the answers to users’ contextual questions?




The new features of Bing Snapshots and Google Now on Tap are exciting to envision with regard to digital textbooks or scholarly and scientific publications.  The resulting features, contextual question answering, resemble those of intelligent tutoring systems.  The API’s as well as document interoperability, digital textbook interoperability, could scale for intelligent tutoring system scenarios.










Kind regards,




Adam Sobieski

http://www.phoster.com