1. What it is and who it’s for
2. Contents
3. Search tools
4. Semantic search engine

1. What it is and who it’s for

Encyclomedia is a new-concept digital encyclopaedia where history, literature, science, music, philosophy, art as well as economy, law, medicine, technology, myth, religion and communication bind together to bring you all the highlights of Europe’s civilization – from antiquity to the dawn of the third millennium.

Centred on the European civilisation – intended as the birthplace and cradle of western culture – Encyclomedia features all the events related to Europe, including those that developed on other continents and came from other civilisations.

Encyclomedia’s modular and molecular structure is designed to welcome updates and enhancements from all locations.

Encyclomedia brings you a vast and detailed fresco of events, thoughts, daily life and culture in all its facets – a complex and far-reaching work that also involved 400 leading experts in the various disciplines under the guidance of Umberto Eco.

Encyclomedia’s textual and multimedia material has been organised into a proprietary content management platform. This enables you to enjoy tremendous search-and-view performances and to extract and download e-books (in epub and mobile formats), delve into essays and create your own full-blown itineraries (based on time range, discipline or topic), which you can look up at any time on any web-based device (PC, tablet, iPad).

The wealth of links and the exclusive and ground-breaking search tools constitute a full-blown new-concept, interactive, multimedia and multidisciplinary knowledge system.

Encyclomedia is the online encyclopaedia for all families that care about their children’s education, for humanities enthusiasts, for students and teachers from middle school to university and college. Thanks also to the fame of Umberto Eco, Encyclomedia’s English translation has the potential to draw billions of users worldwide.

2. Contents

Over 3000 essays penned by leading scholars have been included to provide expert insight into Encyclomedia’s topics, biographies and events. These essays are equivalent to 50 printed books of 600 pages each.
Each Essay is linked to other Essays through a dense network of references.
All Essays feature a series of hotwords that activate links leading to other information tools (Files, the Dynamic Atlas, Timelines, Audio-video material, etc.), opening up to a virtually limitless learning experience.

Around 40,000 files (short descriptions of events, people, works and places) are the junctions of Encyclomedia’s immense hyperlink network. Surfing the links you can find every possible relationship between people, situations, events, places and works.
Furthermore, each File links to its related Essays.
This mode of exploring nurtures curiosity and boosts the joy of learning – it is the perfect tool to meet the demands of students and teachers in the digital age.

A database of over 10,000 pictures, animations, historical maps, audio clips and video clips as well as film sequences stimulates curiosity and helps to understand and relive past events.

3. Search tools

Timeline creator.
Not only does Encyclomedia enable you to surf its contents with the help of a dense network of links, it also offers you a unique and cutting-edge search engine – a time machine of sorts you can use to create comparative timelines, i.e. time-maps that allow you to highlight and discover connections and measure time-lapses between events, people, ideas and works in any number of disciplines, in any given historical period and in any geographical location you choose.

The ability to place historical matter in time and space across multiple disciplines is an indispensable requisite according to the latest educational prescriptions.

Time-map creator
Thanks to Encyclomedia’s interactive Dynamic Atlas you can view the geopolitical situation at any given time in history and follow all the changes that occurred in the last six thousand years, from the birth of the first civilisations all the way to our day and age.

By moving the time cursor or setting a specific date, States, cities and borders will change, vanish and reappear right before your eyes, producing the equivalent of roughly 12,000 geo-historical maps.

All your click paths and search results can be saved in your personal folder.
The tablet version of Encyclomedia also supports social networking.

4. Semantic search engine

The Search Engine at the core of Encyclomedia Online and its search tools is based on an interactive network of semantic relationships among terms and events. The more active your learning process is, the more effective your learning becomes. Every concept that is semantically akin to your query may constitute a topic of interest from where you can set off on a new exploration.

Encyclomedia’s content has been built into the semantic search engine so that every query will branch into multiple areas concerning disciplines, concepts, events, people and places, delivering fully exhaustive query results.

Indeed, since the information contained in Encyclomedia Online has been sorted, categorised and anchored to every junction in the massive network, queries are analysed semantically; thus, the semantic search engine explores a broader range of meanings and returns much richer and more in-depth results than a normal search engine.

Furthermore, special algorithms assign a different weight to the information depending on your search query, in order to find and highlight the most important information in relation to your core interest.

A unique and ground-breaking tool, Encyclomedia’s semantic search engine is the result of advanced computing techniques merged with analytical and original content organisation. Wisdom and science come together to create knowledge.

Released in mid-2011, the Encyclomedia Online website, which includes all of the functions and features described above, is currently in use in Italian, German and British universities; furthermore, over 200,000 licences have been issued to Italian secondary schools.

Soon to be released: the new HTML5 Web Application version for browsers on iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Kindle Fire and other Android tablets as well as for PC and Mac users.