Language‐Independent Access to History Textbooks: Utilizing GIS Functionality with Spatiotemporal and Thematic Metadata

Integrating and accessing structured textual content obtained from different sources is a challenging task and becomes even more so when dealing with multiple languages. The objective of this article is to showcase the technological efforts towards the creation of a digital European history textbook repository that integrates respective textbooks from various countries and publishers. The content integration is achieved by introducing language independent metadata based on space (locations), time (dates), and thematic categories (history gazetteer). Providing adequate interfaces such metadata can be used to offer language‐independent access to Multilanguage history textbook content. The specific focus in this article will be on (1) presenting the metadata, (2) the data management approach including indexing the history textbook content and (3) the resulting textbook repository including its GIS‐based interface, allowing for a combination of map, timeline and keyword based search of the history content.