Pundit: Creating, Exploring and Consuming Semantic Annotations

This paper presents Pundit, a novel semantic web annotation tool, and demonstrates its use in producing structured data out of users annotations. Pundit allows communities of scholars to produce machinereadable annotations that can be made public and thus consumable as web data via SPARQL and ad-hoc REST APIs. Pundit is highly configurable and can deployed in custom instances to include well-defined and agreed annotation vocabularies. Such instances can be distributed as bookmaklets to community users so they can create uniformly structured data in a certain application scenario. Basing on the provided APIs, some demonstrative applications have been developed, exploring different use scenarios, ranging from philosophy to journalism and cultural heritage. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate how such uniformly structured annotations can be quickly re-used on the web to make information discoverable or to visualize it in interesting ways.