Using WEESA to Semantically Annotate Cocoon

The Semantic Web is based on the idea that Web applications provide semantically annotatedWeb pages. This metadata is typically added in the semantic annotation process which is currently not part of the Web engineering process. Web engineering, however, proposes methodologies to design, implement and maintain Web applications but lack semantic annotation. In this paper we show how WEESA, a mapping from XML documents to ontologies, can be used in Apache Cocoon Web applications to semantically annotate Web pages. We introduce Cocoon transformer components that use the WEESA mapping definition to automatically generate RDF meta-data from XML documents. We further show how existing Cocoon Web applications can be extended to Semantic Web applications and discuss the experiences gained in an industry case study.