Theophrastus: On demand and real-time automatic annotation and exploration of (web) documents using open linked data

Theophrastus is a system that supports the automatic annotation of (web) documents through entity mining and provides exploration services by exploiting Linked Open Data (LOD), in real-time and only when needed. The system aims at assisting biologists in their research on species and biodiversity. It was based on requirements coming from the biodiversity domain and was awarded the first prize in the Blue Hackathon 2013. Theophrastus has been designed to be highly configurable regarding a number of different aspects like entities of interest, information cards and external search systems. As a result it can be exploited in different contexts and other areas of interest. The provided experimental results show that the proposed approach is efficient and can be applied in real-time.