Abstract

Manual semantic markup of documents will only be ubiquitous if users can express annotations that conform to ontologies (or schemas) that have shared meaning. But any given user is unlikely to be intimately familiar with the details of that ontology. We describe an implemented approach to help users create semi-structured semantic annotations for a document according to an extensible schema or ontology. In our approach, users enter a short sentence in free text to describe all or part of a document, then the system presents a set of potential reformulations of the sentence that are generated from valid expressions in the ontology and the user chooses the closest match. We use a combination of off-the-shelf parsing tools and breadth-first search of expressions in the ontology to help users create valid annotations starting from free text. The user can also define new terms to augment the ontology, so the potential matches can improve over time. The annotations should ideally follow the ontology as closely as possible, while allowing users who may not know the terms in the ontology to make statements easily and deviate from the formal representation of the ontology if they so desire.

Date

October 20, 2003

Authors

Jim Blythe, Yolanda Gil

Journal

Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003)

Pages

29