A Classification of Semantic Annotation Systems

The Object-Subject-Predicate triple annotation system is now well adopted in the research community, however, it does not always speak to end-users. In fact, explaining all the complexity of semantic annotation systems to laymen can sometime be difficult. We believe that this communication can be simplified by providing a meaningful abstraction of the state of the art in semantic annotation models and thus, in this article, we describe the issue of semantic annotation and review a number of research and end-user tools in the field. Doing so, we provide a clear classification schemes of the features of annotation systems. We then show how this scheme can be used to clarify requirements of end-user use cases and thus simplify the communication between semantic annotation experts and the actual users of this technology.