CREAM: CREAting Metadata for the Semantic Web

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata. While the annotation mode of CREAM allows creation of metadata for existing Web pages, the authoring mode lets authors create metadata-almost for free-while putting together the content of a page. As a feature of our framework, CREAM allows creating relational metadata, i.e., metadata that instantiate interrelated definitions of classes in a domain ontology rather than a comparatively rigid template-like schema such as Dublin Core. We discuss some of the requirements one has to meet when developing such an ontology-based framework, e.g., the integration of a metadata crawler, inference services, document management and a meta-ontology, and describe its implementation, viz. OntoMat, a component-based, ontology-driven Web-page authoring and annotation tool. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.