It is the age of the social web, where people express themselves by giving their opinions about various issues, from their personal life to the world’s political issues. This process generates a lot of opinion data on the web that can be processed for valuable information, and therefore, semantic annotation of opinions becomes an important task. Unfortunately, existing opinion annotation schemes have failed to satisfy annotation challenges and cannot even adhere to the basic definition of opinion. Opinion holders, topical features and temporal expressions are major components of an opinion that remain ignored in existing annotation schemes. In this work, we propose OpinionML, a new Markup Language, that aims to compensate for the issues that existing typical opinion markup languages fail to resolve. We present a detailed discussion about existing annotation schemes and their associated problems. We argue that OpinionML is more robust, flexible and easier for annotating opinion data. Its modular approach while implementing a logical model provides us with a flexible and easier model of annotation. OpinionML can be considered a step towards “information symmetry”. It is an effort for consistent sentiment annotations across the research community. We perform experiments to prove robustness of the proposed OpinionML and the results demonstrate its capability of retrieving significant components of opinion segments. We also propose OpinionML ontology in an effort to make OpinionML more inter-operable. The ontology proposed is more complete than existing opinion ontologies like Marl and Onyx. A comprehensive comparison of the proposed ontology with existing sentiment ontologies Marl and Onyx proves its worth.

The authors wish to make the following corrections to their paper