Abstract
Many of the proposed approaches to the semantic web have a substantial drawback. They are all based on the idea that web pages (or more generally, resources), will contain semantic annotations that would allow remote agents to access them. However the problem of the creation of those annotations is seldom addressed. Manual creation of the annotations is not a feasible option, except in a few experimental cases.
We propose an approach based on Language Processing techniques that addresses this issue, at least for textual resources (which still constitute the vast majority of the material available on the web). Documents are analized fully automatically and converted into a semantic annotation, which can then be stored together with the original documents. It is this annotation that constitutes the machine understandable resource that remote agents can query.
A semi-automatic approach is also considered, in which the system suggests candidate annotations and the user simply has to approve or reject them. Advantages and drawbacks of both approaches are discussed.
Rinaldi, Fabio