A FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO SEMANTIC ANNOTATION SYSTEMS FOR WEB CONTENT MANUEL FIORELLI, a * MARIA TERESA PAZIENZA b AND ARMANDO STELLATO b a Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy b Department of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy SUMMARY In this paper we propose a flexible approach that supports heterogeneous requirements on systems for the seman- tic annotation of web content. The flexibility of the approach originates from a model based on the definition of abstract events, which captures at the logical level the main interactions occurring in a system for combined man- agement of ontologies and web content. Application-specific semantics is then provided operationally as an assignment of handlers to these events. While the abstract events are rather coarse-grained to reduce prior com- mitment, preconditions on the handlers express application-specific distinctions based on contextual information associated with each specific event. Although the possibility to define completely new handlers guarantees the generality of our approach, we foster convention over configuration by providing a set of default handlers, which can be customized by filling their extension points. The use of customizable handlers, whether or not the default ones, reduces the development effort and guarantees consistent user experience despite evolving requirements. A comprehensive framework for semantic annotation of web content has been realized and will be hereafter intro- duced. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: Semantic Annotation; Semantic Web; Software Engineering 1. INTRODUCTION In the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) the meaning of resources, possibly including services (Payne and Lassila, 2004), is captured through annotations with respect to well-defined ontologies. In fact, formalized knowledge is believed to allow software agents to better interact with web resources and perform intelligent tasks on behalf of humans, such as aggregating information from various sources and composing web services. Beyond research on knowledge representation and automatic reasoning, the deployment of the Semantic Web required further investigation on pragmatic aspects related to the publication and the reuse of disparate knowledge on the Web. This line of development flowed into the Linked Open Data movement which elaborated a collection of best practices (Heath and Bizer, 2011) aimed at better connecting the Semantic Web to the architecture of the Web. Detractors criticized that Linked Open Data is nothing but a rebranding of the Semantic Web, perhaps aimed at revitalizing the interest on the field as a whole. We agree with the response to these concerns provided by Heath (2009), who stated: “Linked Data isn’t about rebranding the Semantic Web, it’s about clarifying its fundamentals”. * Correspondence to: Manuel Fiorelli, Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy. E-mail: fiorelli@info.uniroma2.it Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS IN ACCOUNTING, FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT Intell. Sys. Acc. Fin. Mgmt. 22, 65–79 (2015) Published online 27 January 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/isaf.1362