The intelligent textbook that helps students learn

The aim of Inquire is to provide students with the world's first intelligent textbook, says its creator David Gunning of Seattle-based Vulcan.

At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related. When a student asks a question - "what does a protein do?", for instance - the system first converts it into a more structured query, such as "what is the function of a protein?", and then uses this to search and find results from the concept map.