Ontology-based Adaptive e-Textbook Platform for Student and Machine Co-Learning

The use of electronic textbooks (e-book) has been heavily studied over the years due to their flexibility, accessibility, interactivity and extensibility. Yet current shortcomings of e-book, which is often just a digitized version of the original book, do not encourage adoption. Consequently, this leads to a rethinking of e-book that should incorporate current technologies to augment its capabilities, where inclusion of information search and organization tools have shown to be favorable. This paper is on a preliminary work to add intelligence into such tools in terms of information retrieval. Construction of knowledge graph for e-book material with little overhead is first introduced. Information retrieval through typed similarity query is then performed via random walk. Case study demonstrates the applicability of the e-book platform, with promising application and advancement in the area of electronic textbooks.