Toward Binding Database Interfaces with Scientific Papers

Despite a large variety of facilities helping to either select or manipulate data from Web interfaces, it remains difficult to provide users with relevant scientific or technical annotations for those data. Introducing such content by hand into a Web interface is a tedious job with a risk of providing incomplete or inadequate content. To overcome this difficulty, we are exploring the possibility of using the names of exposed quantities to index a text corpus. This index can be used to show the most relevant text snippets in a given context. The full text can be displayed by user request and automatically scroll down to that snippet. Our approach is based on the conversion of PDF papers into machine readable files that are indexed by a search engine. Index entries are reported as PDF annotations that are used to control the display. This workflow has been tested on the IVOA standard corpus as a proof of concept. It has then been applied to the XMM-Newton user guides for our catalog interface. Finally, it has been adapted to find resources within portals exposing a lot of various data collections.