Exploiting Wikipedia in integrating semantic annotation with information retrieval

The Semantic Web can be seen as an extension of the current one in which information is given a formal meaning, making it understandable by computers. The process of giving formal meaning to Web resources is commonly known in the state of the art as semantic annotation. In this paper we describe an approach to integrate the semantic annotation task with the information retrieval task. This approach makes use of relevance feedback techniques and exploits the information generated and maintained by Wikipedia users. The validity of our approach is currently being tested by means of a Web portal, which also uses the annotations defined by users in providing basic semantic search facilities.