The need to bridge between the unstructured data on the Document Web and the structured data on the Web of Data has led to the development of a considerable number of annotation tools. However, these tools are currently still hard to compare since the published evaluation results are calculated on diverse datasets and evaluated based on different measures. We present GERBIL, an evaluation framework for semantic entity annotation. The rationale behind our framework is to provide developers, end users and researchers with easy-to-use interfaces that allow for the agile, fine-grained and uniform evaluation of annotation tools on multiple datasets. By these means, we aim to ensure that both tool developers and end users can derive meaningful insights pertaining to the extension, integration and use of annotation applications. In particular, GERBIL provides comparable results to tool developers so as to allow them to easily discover the strengths and weaknesses of their implementations with respect to the state of the art. With the permanent experiment URIs provided by our framework, we ensure the reproducibility and archiving of evaluation results. Moreover, the framework generates data in machine-processable format, allowing for the efficient querying and post-processing of evaluation results. Finally, the tool diag-nostics provided by GERBIL allows deriving insights pertaining to the areas in which tools should be further refined, thus allowing developers to create an informed agenda for extensions and end users to detect the right tools for their purposes. GERBIL aims to become a focal point for the state of the art, driving the research agenda of the community by presenting comparable objective evaluation results.