W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation

by | 16 Oct 2018 | Workshop | 0 comments

W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation (from Manga to Magazines)
 
  • Date : September 18-19, 2018
  • Venue : Mita Campus of Keio University, 2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan
 

Workshop Description

This workshop is intended to bringing together experts to evaluate the current status and explore future directions of visually-rich long-form digital publications based on Web Technologies (particularly CSS, the formatting language of the Web), encompassing both fixed and dynamic layouts. Such “high-design” publications, with complex or sophisticated layout, may be sequential art (Comics, Manga, Bandes Dessinées, etc.), magazines, picture books, cookbooks, educational materials, etc.
 

Session

Vincent Wartelle, CEO at ISI, has been invited to present the results of a recent and ambitious project initiated 3 years ago, to simplify the reflow of EPUB3 FXL.
Mixing Artificial Intelligence and html capture, ISICrunch’ new production system is based on a fully reflow component, which aim to facilitate the eBook accessibility.
 
During its session, Vincent will share the project’ goals and expectations, as well as the product roadmap, which includes the images’ segmentation, the deep learning and the unsupervised learning techniques.
 
Time: TBC
 
For more information, visit the (workshop homepage) -> link to
 

Background

Expression of needs

The overall goal of the project is to answer the needs of producing accessible electronic books, mainly readable on mobile like smartphones for the educational market.   A second goal is to build new resources from the publishing content expressed in the educational books that means modular pieces of content that could exploited for creating eLearning sites, or by teachers and learners for their own pedagogical use.   All those content pieces should also be tagged semantically in order to offer better research facilities to find those new resources.

Issues: the actual FXL production

The actual production of educational books from their equivalent print materials are entirely made in EPUB 3 Fixed-Layout, with a lot of interactivity included in the digital version (images, audios, videos, exercises, etc.).   Each Education Publisher add some extra features to better suit their needs in pedagogical content. Those specific features, which sometimes are not part of the EPUB standards, are then read by the specific readers each Publisher have built (Groupe Hachette, Editis, Humensis in France) just to name a few.   Those actual productions of EPUB3 FXL are known to be slightly difficult to use for the accessible public with disabilities, and also not suitable for mobile learning.

Goals: the planned Reflow production

ISI research team has been thinking for three years about a new production system that solves these blocking points and provides real added value for specific reading both on mobiles and for readers with disabilities.   The first step is to present content which are displayed in double-page (spread) in a new fully Reflow enrichment that benefits from specific “toolbox” bringing DYS and TTS features.   To speed up the production of Reflow components from already existing Fixed-Layout conversions, we propose using AI (Artificial Intelligence) process coupled with our editorial capture technology. By capitalizing on the 3 million pages already processed by our system, and their graphic representation, we expect to find image-recognition algorithms that can help us significantly speed up the process of labeling pages.

Proposed solution

We have recently started an ambitious program, mixing Artificial Intelligence and Html capture to find unprecedented workflow solutions in producing granular and semantic content. Based on more than 1 million images from FXL conversion, conversion and a brand-new capture technology, we have set up a team of researchers, publishers, development experts and epub specialists.

W3C Tokyo Summit Presentation

I am in a position to present the goals and expectations about this project, and the roadmap that we have in mind. To treat the core of the problem (the segmentation of images), the so-called deep learning and unsupervised learning techniques will be used on the basis of a semantic categorization to be specified (e.g. title, graphic, images, paintings…).   Related questions will also be addressed:

  • pre-processing (data cleaning, data visualization diagnosis and descriptive statistics, automatic labeling)
  • post-processing (creation of html pages)
  • the question of accessibility.   Moreover, it should be noted that the manual partition made by ISIcrunch which is done by successive division of images (first text vs. images + background, then in the text: titles, paragraph …) is interesting and proceeds in the same way that neural networks that also works by successive abstraction. This should therefore facilitate the choice of the method to follow.

Vincent WARTELLE
CEO and Founder of ISI
Member of IDPF since 2011