A Cognition-Based Approach for Querying Personal Digital Libraries

The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topics in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tif etc.). Moreover the increasing availability of these on-line libraries, as well as the advent of the so-called semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 1999), is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital, possibly semantically annotated, documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format, we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest. All the extracted information is then encoded with respect to a reference ontology, so that the user can query his digital library by typing free text or browsing the ontology. This approach could help users, because they don´t need to know SQL since they could only recall visual hints about a document: like find me a document with a picture on the left side and a big title centered on top of the page