A Wikipedia-Based Framework for Collaborative Semantic Annotation

The semantic web aims at automating web data processing tasks that nowadays only humans are able to do. To make this vision a reality, the information on web resources should be described in a computer-meaningful way, in a process known as semantic annotation. In this paper, a manual, collaborative semantic annotation framework is described. It is designed to take advantage of the benefits of manual annotation systems (like the possibility of annotating formats difficult to annotate in an automatic manner) addressing at the same time some of their limitations (reduce the burden for non-expert annotators). The framework is inspired by two principles: use Wikipedia as a facade for a formal ontology and integrate the semantic annotation task with common user actions like web search. The tools in the framework have been implemented, and empirical results obtained in experiences carried out with these tools are reported.