Ontology-based web annotation framework for hyperlink structures

Heterogeneous and autonomous web sites contain information that cannot be easily processed by automated tools. To address the heterogeneity issues, one attempt is to add metadata to Web pages to provide semantic description of the web pages and other kinds of web objects. This is also known as web annotation. Ontology-based Web annotation (OWA) is a kind of web annotation that associates ontologies with annotations. Since each ontology is usually adopted by some user community, OWA therefore facilitates sharing of knowledge among users sharing the ontology. In our survey, we noted that most existing OWA approaches only annotate web pages, but not the hyperlinks among them. This restricts the association of useful semantics to the hyperlinks between web pages. In this paper, we therefore propose to annotate hyperlink information as part of OWA. Users can create annotations for hyperlink structures and to utilize such annotations in browsing links between web pages and querying web sites. We first present a general OWA framework consisting different components. An XML-based annotation scheme for annotating hyperlink structures is also proposed.