SEAN: A System for Semantic Annotation of Web Documents

Semantic Web documents use metadata to express the meaning of the content encapsulated within them. Although RDF/XML has been widely recognized as the standard vehicle for describing metadata, an enormous amount of semantic data is still being encoded in HTML documents that are designed primarily for human consumption. Tools such as those pioneered by SHOE[6] and OntoBroker[5] facilitate manual annotation of HTML documents with semantic markups. In this demo we will present SEAN, a system for automatically annotating HTML documents. It is based on the idea that well-organized HTML documents, especially those that are machine generated from templates, contain rich data denoting semantic concepts (e.g. “News Taxonomy” and “Major Headline News”) and concept instances. These kinds of documents are increasingly common nowadays since most Web sites (e.g., news portals, product portals, etc.) are typically maintained using content management software that creates HTML documents by populating templates from backen