Semantic Authoring By Tagging with Annotea Social Bookmarks and Topics

Annotea is a framework that supports Semantic Web based collaboration and authoring via Annotea objects, such as social annotations, bookmarks, and topics. Social bookmarks and topics can be used for semantic authoring in many levels. They let ordinary users tag interesting Web documents with their own personal concepts (folksonomies). These concepts can be simple or form hierarchies, and they can be linked to more standard concepts when users become aware of them. Collections of the concepts and the bookmarks under them can be stored to bookmark documents or services as metadata and easily shared with other users. Annotea users can also literally semantically author pages with link collections and categories. They can use the title and description information of the topics and bookmarks to create the page content. This content from the bookmark and topics hierarchies is then easily converted to XHTML Web pages by using XSLT scripts. Annotea presentation objects further support authoring and customized presentations by separating the presentation and the application data. While Annotea precedes tagging and social bookmarking services and tools popular today it still provides better flexibility, extendibility, and reuse of the bookmark and topic data with help of the Semantic Web technologies.