The importance of literacy, the ability to read and comprehend a written document is so great in the modern world that the United Nations considers literacy to be a fundamental human right. From legal documents to educational materials to cultural heritage, the importance of understanding the information contained in written texts is fundamental to modern society. The Internet has created new challenges for literacy, where people can easily access a document that they lack the domain specific background to understand. Consequentially, they often surf to other documents, seeking ones they can understand, even if they contain less useful information than the original document. The proposed work assists people in burrowing down into documents they are specifically interested in understanding, instead of having to browse off to other often tangential and potentially less reliable documents, in their quest for comprehensible information. Although this proposed technology was created to assist people in understanding or analyzing chemical documents, it can be of value to understanding documents in any technical or other specialized domain.
Information and Communication Technologies have been changing how our society shares, communicates and manipulates information. The proposed technology "WikiHyperGlossary (WHG)" is an Information and Communication Technology that uses both social (web 2.0) and semantic (web 3.0) technologies to both increase the readability of digital printed documents, and connect them to new forms of information. The WHG allows the public to follow hyperlinks that are automatically added to words in a document of interest, based on whatever glossary the user chooses. As a semantic tool demonstrated in the chemical sciences, the WHG allows access to cheminformatic information like spectra and physical properties of compounds mentioned in an article, as well as the ability to edit those molecules and acquire information on the newly created molecules. This team plans to apply this architecture to other domains as well, as it seeks multiple commercialization opportunities.
