Markup Beyond the Trees

Abstract

The issue of enabling the coexistence of independent sets of annotations that may overlap on the same textual content has been and still is an important topic to address within the document markup community. In this chapter, I propose a solution to the problem of overlapping markup based on the use of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, I introduce EARMARK, the Extremely Annotational RDF Markup, a markup metalanguage and an OWL ontology that enable one to create documents with single hierarchies (as with XML) and also with multiple overlapping hierarchies whose textual content within the markup items belongs to some hierarchies but not to others. I show possible scenarios of application of EARMARK and, finally, I discuss how to use existing Semantic Web technologies, e.g., OWL DL reasoners, to assess the correctness properties typical of the structural markup, such as validity against a schema.