Bridging the Knowledge Gap between Research and Education through Textbooks

We describe a web-based system that helps undergraduate students learn about research at their university through the medium of textbooks. The system, called University on Textbooks, links textbooks to research articles written by university researchers, enabling people to navigate between introductory materials in textbooks and specific topics reported in research articles. Bidirectional links are generated from semantic statements created manually for topical passages from textbooks and abstracts of articles. The semantic statements are created using an ontology that is based on a description logic, so a reasoner can infer the semantic similarity between pairs of statements. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach, we present a prototype containing 100 semantic statements describing passages from an undergraduate life sciences textbook in Japanese that have been linked to semantic statements created for 392 research articles from life sciences.