Eclipse INCEpTION

Eclipse INCEpTION offers a browser-based platform for semantic text annotation. Text annotation is the task of adding structured information to documents: marking which spans mention a person, a disease or a gene, recording how those mentions relate to each other, and linking each one to a concept in a knowledge base. The annotated corpora that result are the raw material for linguistic and digital humanities research, for domain studies in fields such as medicine and law, and for training and evaluating machine learning models. Producing them is slow manual work, usually spread across several annotators whose output has to be reconciled into a single reliable gold standard.

Eclipse INCEpTION covers that entire workflow in one application. Users define their own annotation scheme in the browser, ground it in their own ontology, annotate alone or as a team, and let machine learning recommenders that train on the work done so far take over the repetitive part.

• Annotation against an ontology. Load RDF, OWL, OBO, SKOS or Turtle, or query a remote SPARQL endpoint live. Ready-made profiles for Wikidata, SNOMED CT, the Gene Ontology, the Human Phenotype Ontology and GND.
• Arbitrarily layered schemes. Entities, relations, coreference, syntax, frames and document labels over the same text, with typed features and slots, all configurable in the browser.
• Suggestions that improve while you work. Recommenders train on the annotations made so far; active learning surfaces the cases they are least certain about. Nothing is written to the corpus until the annotator accepts it.
• Quality control. Curate multiple annotators into a gold standard, measure inter-annotator agreement, and inspect the collected data in the Explorer.
• Flexible deployment. A desktop installer for a single researcher, or a server deployment for an entire institution, on self-hosted hardware and integrated with the organisation's single sign-on.
• Programmatic access. A REST API, webhooks, and support for user-supplied models through the external recommender interface.
• Interoperable formats. Imports plain text, PDF, HTML and TEI; exports UIMA CAS XMI/JSON with custom layers intact, or CoNLL-U.

Eclipse INCEpTION has since become a staple of the text annotation community — it was the most-used annotation tool reported at LREC 2026, and more than 120 papers published in 2025 and 2026 alone have used it (https://inception-project.github.io/papers-using-inception/).