Abstract:

An e-book can be treated as a new type of information object with a complex structure in which its content is broken down into atomic units called "content nodes" and semantically linked together to form a hypermedia database. Content nodes can be of different media types such as images, video clips, text, etc. and the content could come from different sources including the LOD (Linked Open Data) cloud. As a result, an e-book could serve as a distributed semantic hypermedia database. This new way of viewing e-books will increase the potential and benefits of e-books. A reader could read them as a well-structured book or query their distributed but connected content as a semantic hypermedia database. Such a view of e-books demands a well-defined data model for their rigorous representation, design, and utilization. A conceptual model for e-books has been developed using RDF (Resource Description Framework) as the modeling language. The data model has been verified to satisfy all major requirements for e-books and support all their necessary operations.