A Pen Scanner Based System for Easy Access to Relevant WWW Hyperlinks

Practical means are needed to integrate printed products with electronic media in the school environment. A new type of hybrid media system has been constructed for this purpose. The patented system uses a pen scanner to access WWW hyperlinks on the Internet. Thus, the system forms a convenient bridge between printed and net media. The link anchors in the printed presentation are specially marked. The marked words are scanned with a pen scanner attached to a PC. By applying powerful text recognition and string matching, the predetermined hyperlinks are automatically chosen from a list of possible candidates and shown by the WWW browser. In addition to these editorial links, the system also applies WWW search engines for retrieving documents containing the link anchor text. The retrieved documents are put in their order of relevance. Voice synthesis of the anchor text and page titles can be used as user feedback. The system has been tested by teachers in 5 comprehensive schools in the Helsinki region as a tool for preparing their lessons. These user tests show that the pen scanner based system was clearly easier to use than traditional keyboard entering of URLs and search words.