Exploring Social Annotations For The Semantic Web

In order to obtain a machine understandable semantics for web resources, research on the Semantic Web tries to annotate web resources with concepts and relations from explicitly defined formal ontologies. This kind of formal annotation is usually done manually or semi-automatically. Although this top-down approach has been successfully used in applications like bioinformatics and knowledge management, they also have some disadvantages. Firstly, establishing ontology as a semantic backbone for a large number of distributed web resources is not easy. Different people or applications may have different views on what exists in these web resources and this leads to the difficulty of the establishment of a commitment to a common ontology. Secondly, even if the consensus of a common ontology can be achieved, it may not be able to catch the fast pace of change of the targeted web resources or the change of user vocabularies in their applications. Thirdly, using ontology to do manual annotation requires the annotator have some skill in ontology engineering which is a quite high requirement for normal web users.In this paper, we explore a complement approach that focuses on the social annotations of the web which are annotations manually made by...