The information explosion of the Web aggravates the problem of effective information retrieval. Even though linguistic approaches found in the literature perform linguistic annotation by creating metadata in the form of tokens, lemmas or part of speech tags, however, this process is insufficient. This is due to the fact that these linguistic metadata do not exploit the actual content of the page, leading to the need of performing semantic annotation based on a predefined semantic model. This paper proposes a new learning approach for performing automatic semantic annotation. This is the result of a two step procedure: the first step partitions a web page into blocks based on its visual layout, while the second, performs subsequent partitioning based on the examination of appearance of specific types of entities denoting the semantic category as well as the application of a number of simple heuristics. Preliminary experiments performed on a manually annotated corpus regarding athletics proved to be very promising.

The huge amount of the available information in the Web creates the need of effective information extraction systems that are able to produce metadata that satisfy user’s information needs. The development of such systems, in the majority of cases, depends on the availability of an appropriately annotated corpus in order to learn extraction models. The production of such corpora can be significantly facilitated by annotation tools that are able to annotate, according to a defined ontology, not only named entities but most importantly relations between them. This paper describes the BOEMIE ontology-based annotation tool which is able to locate blocks of text that correspond to specific types of named entities, fill tables corresponding to ontology concepts with those named entities and link the filled tables based on relations defined in the domain ontology. Additionally, it can perform annotation of blocks of text that refer to the same topic. The tool has a user-friendly interface, supports automatic pre-annotation, annotation comparison as well as customization to other annotation schemata. The annotation tool has been used in a large scale annotation task involving 3,000 web pages regarding athletics. It has also been used in another annotation task involving 503 web pages with medical information, in different languages.