An Ontology-Based Reasoning Approach for Document Annotation

Information management has become an important challenge, especially when most of their relevant and strategic documents are available on the Web only for human interpretation. Annotating documents rises as an interesting strategy to diminish the hard task of retrieving important documents from the Web. Annotations consist of associating metadata with text segments of a document, in order to facilitate its retrieval by search engines. Besides improving their performance, annotations enable an optimized indexation of documents. However, due to the huge amount of existing documents, the idea of generating document annotations is not a trivial task. This paper presents a proposal for automatically enriching documents with semantic annotations, where document terms are annotated according to a domain ontology. Currently there already exist some document annotation tools to automate this process. However, the main contribution of this work is focused on the ability of exploring the ontology inference capability and on the meta-annotation concept, which aim at providing users and automatic agents with a more powerful mechanism to retrieve information.