Maskkot - An Entity-centric Annotation Platform

The Semantic Web is facing the important challenge to maintain its promise of a real world-wide graph of interconnected resources. Unfortunately, while URIs almost guarantee a direct reference to entities, the relation between the two is not bijective. Many different URI references to same concepts and entities can arise when -in such a heterogeneous setting as the WWW -people independently build new ontologies, or populate shared ones with new arbitrarily identified individuals. The proliferation of URIs is an unwanted, though natural effect strictly bound to the same principles which characterize the Semantic Web; reducing this phenomenon will improve the recall of Semantic Search engines, which could rely on explicit links between heterogeneous information sources. To address this problem, in this paper we present an integrated environment combining the semantic annotation and ontology building features available in the Semantic Turkey web browser extension, with globally unique identifiers for entities provided by the okkam Entity Name System, thus realizing a valuable resource for preventing diffusion of multiple URIs on the (Semantic) Web.