Structuring and presenting annotated media repositories

The Semantic Web envisions a Web that is both human readable and machine processible. In practice, however, there is still a large conceptual gap between annotated content repositories on the one hand, and coherent, human readable Web pages on the other. To bridge this conceptual gap, one needs to select the appropriate content from the repository, structure and order the material, and design a Web page that effectively conveys the selected content and the chosen structure. In addition to this conceptual gap, there is also a technological gap. On one side of this gap, we find the semantic-oriented technology deployed to build annotated content repositories. This includes RDF, RDF Schema and OWL. On the other side of the gap is the syntax-oriented technology deployed to build Websites. This includes XML, XSLT, CSS, XHTML and SMIL. In this paper, we discuss the conceptual relationships between the world of explicit metadata semantics and the world of Web presentations and their underlying syntactic formats. We also explore to what extent this gap can be bridged automatically, and how current Web technologies can be used to support this process.