The Briefing Associate: easing authors into the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web has clear benefits for information consumers, but for authors it typically means added work with no immediate payoff. This article describes Briefing Associate (BA), a tool that eases the effort by automating markup within a popular commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application. The BA is a descendent of the Design Editor, an application for producing visual, domain-specific design environments. Both tools are implemented as extensions of Microsoft´s PowerPoint, which, as this paper describes, is a key factor in our research.