A Template-Based Markup Tool for Semantic Web Content

The Intelligence Community, among others, is increasingly using document metadata to improve document search and discovery on intranets and extranets. Document markup is still often incomplete, inconsistent, incorrect, and limited to keywords via HTML and XML tags. OWL promises to bring semantics to this markup to improve its machine understandability. A usable markup tool is becoming a barrier to the more widespread use of OWL markup in operational settings. This paper describes some of our attempts at building markup tools, lessons learned, and our latest markup tool, the Semantic Markup Tool (SMT). SMT uses automatic text extractors and templates to hide ontological complexity from end users and helps them quickly specify events and relationships of interest in the document. SMT automatically generates correct and consistent OWL markup. This comes at a cost to expressivity. We are evaluating SMT on several pilot semantic web efforts.