The objective of CITER, an eContentplus project, is the creation of a digital European history textbook repository by integration of already existing material with the publishers in the respective countries. The integration is achieved by introducing language independent metadata schemata based on space (locations), time (dates), and thematic categories. Using this metadata will allows us to access history textbook content in a language independent way!

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Metadata

The specific metadata corpuses defined in this project will be

• a European thematic ontology for history concepts
• a multilingual location corpus.

The thematic ontology will contain thematic categories used in country-specific curricula to arrive at a thematic ontology covering all of Europe. Such an ontology can be used to define a language-independent categorization of content. Further, to be able to identify locations in arbitrary textbooks, a multilingual dataset that includes historic place names is needed and will be compiled. Using these three distinguished metadata aspects of history content will allow us to integrate history textbook resources to compile a European text base. Machine translation facilities in connection with metadata-base browsing can then be used to provide language-independent browsing and text retrieval.

Interface

Linking metadata to content will allow us to access history textbook content in a language independent way. The following interface provides (i) spatial, map-based, (ii) temporal and (iii) thematic search criteria to retrieve respective multilanguage content.

History content will be retrieved (i) in its original language and (ii) all content translated to the remaining target languages of the project using automatic translation tools.

As content is stored preserving its original structure (chapters, sections, examples, original sources, etc.), the interface showing the search results preserves this structure and provides for a powerful means to assess and utilize the retrieved content.

Overall, this project aims at increasing the use of electronic textbooks in a modern classroom scenario. The re-use of content will be increased by using language independent browsing in combination with quality machine translation providing access to foreign language content. Specifically designed educational evaluation scenarios will be used to access the usability in a classroom context, i.e., obtaining a multiperspective view of history but also as a research means for new textbooks.