Authoring and annotation of web pages in CREAM

Richly interlinked, machine-understandable data constitute the basis for the Semantic Web. We provide a framework, CREAM, that allows for creation of metadata. While the annotation mode of CREAM allows to create metadata for existing web pages, the authoring mode lets authors create metadata --- almost for free --- while putting together the content of a page.As a particularity of our framework, CREAM allows to create relational metadata, i.e. metadata that instantiate interrelated definitions of classes in a domain ontology rather than a comparatively rigid template-like schema asm Dublin Core. We discuss some of the requirements one has to meet when developing such an ontology-based framework, e.g. the integration of a metadata crawler, inference services, document management and a meta-ontology, and describe its implementation, viz. Ont-O-Mat, a component-based, ontology-driven Web page authoring and annotation tool.