In the last couple of years, as part of the Semantic Web activity, a number of different systems have been built. These systems help perform one of two tasks: (1) create ontologies, and (2) annotate web pages with ontology derived semantic tags. By and large, both classes of systems have been focused on manual and semi-automatic tooling to improve the productivity of a human ontologist or annotator rather than on fully automated methods.

Glossary:
DAML - DARPA Agent Markup Language
DAML+OIL - a successor language to DAML and OIL that combines features of both.
DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
OIL - Ontology Inference Layer.
OWL - Web Ontology Language - Superseeds DAML and OIL
RDF - Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model using XML but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling knowledge, through a variety of syntax formats TAP - (formerly The Alpiri Project) - An RDF database of 1000s of 'real world' things,. (organised into categories).
See http://www.openrdf.org/
Semantic Web - A project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the World Wide Web.
TAP KB - TAP Knowledge Base
tap.rdf - TAP Resource Description Framework

Links:
What is Ontology? at ksl.Stanford.edu
SemTag and Seeker: Bootstrapping the Semantic Web via Automated Semantic Annotation at IBM Almaden Research Center, 2003

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