Enrichment of Geographic Information Based on Gazetteers: An experiment in Massive Open Online Courses

A large amount of geographic information is contained in text documents available in the Web. For instance, forum messages posted by students in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may contain references to places. Unfortunately, this information is not exploited, although it can be useful to further understand the topics of the courses. Therefore, the authors propose an approach to instantly provide additional information to MOOC students about geographic features found in publications at course forums. The results are displayed through our tool, ORBIS, which automatically highlights the geographic entities in the texts. With this tool, the student gets 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. The authors applied their prototype to the students' posts in the forum space for the Geo-MOOC titled Maps and the Geospatial Revolution course, offered by the Pennsylvania State University.