Thoughts on the complex relation between linked data, semantic annotations, and ontologies

The relation between data, annotations, and schemata seems straightforward at first: Data are annotated with additional meta information according to some schemata in order to expose additional non-intrinsic characteristics relevant to the meaningful interpretation of said data. However, on closer examination, things are not as simple. Focusing on geo-information retrieval, we will try to disentangle the aforementioned relations. We will report from our own experience and from observations gathered by editing papers about ontologies and Linked Data for the Semantic Web journal.