Semantic metadata will playa significant role in the provision of the Semantic Web. Agents will need metadata that describes the content of resources in order to perform operations, such as retrieval, over those resources. In addition, if rich semantic metadata is supplied, those agents can then employreasoning over the metadata, enhancing their processing power. Keyto this approach is the provision of annotations, both through automatic and human means. The semantics of these annotations, however, in terms of the mechanisms through which they are interpreted and presented to the user, are sometimes unclear. In this paper, we identifya number of candidate interpretations of annotation, and discuss the impact these interpretations mayhave on Semantic Web applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002.