Semantic annotation tools survey

The Web has come a long way since its invention by Berners-Lee, when it focused essentially on visualization and presentation of content for human consumption (Syntactic Web), to a Web providing meaningful content, facilitating the integration between people and machines (Semantic Web). This paper presents a survey of different tools that provide the enrichment of the Web with understandable annotation, in order to make its content available and interoperable between systems. We can group Semantic Annotation tools into the diverse dimensions: dynamicity, storage, information extraction process, scalability and customization. The analysis of the different annotation tools shows that (semi-)automatic and automatic systems aren't as efficient as needed without human intervention and will continue to evolve to solve the challenge. Microdata, RDFa and the new HTML5 standard will certainly bring new contributions to this issue.