Innovation on Geo-Enrichment of Texts Using Gazetteers for Massive Open On-Line Courses

Abstract

Text documents available in the Web contain a large amount of geographic information. For instance, forum messages posted by students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may contain references to places. Normally, this information is not exploited, although it can be useful to further understand the topics of courses. Therefore, we propose an approach to instantly provide additional information to MOOC students about geographic features found in publications at course forums (geo-enrichment). The results are displayed through our tool, called ORBIS, which automatically highlights the geographic entities in the texts, and provides access to additional information in the same environment, without disruption; interacting with maps and spatial relationships with other entities. Information on locations mentioned in text is obtained from queries posted to the gazetteer Linked OntoGazetteer. We applied our prototype to the students' posts in the forum space for the MOOC titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, offered by the Pennsylvania State University.