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rv TOMAS ISAKOWITZ, MICHAEL BIEBER, AND FABIO VITALI, GUEST EDITORST hree years ago, when two of us guest edited a special section on hypermedia design for this magazine [l], the Web was a relatively nascent field. At that time, our focus was on the general principles for designing hypermedia applications. Since then, the scope of Web-based applications has grown enormously, now encompassing four general kinds of Web-based systems: Intranets^ to support internal work, Web-presence sites that are marketing tools designed to reach consumers outside the firm, electronic commerce systems that support consumer interaction, such as online shopping, and a blend of internal and external systems to support business-tobusiness communication, commonly called extranets. Thus, a Web platform has transformed itself in the 78 ]iilx 1998/Vol 41, No 7 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM This spctwl secrion was suppontd liy tht NASA

Abstract. The availability in machine-readable form of descriptions of the structure of documents, as well as of the document discourse (e.g. the scientific discourse within scholarly articles), is crucial for facilitating semantic publishing and the overall comprehension of documents by both users and machines. In this paper we introduce DoCO, the Document Components Ontology, an OWL 2 DL ontology that provides a general-purpose structured vocabulary of document elements to describe both structural and rhetorical document components in RDF. In addition to giving a formal description of the ontology, this paper showcases its utility in practice in a variety of our own applications and other activities of the Semantic Publishing community that rely on DoCO to annotate and retrieve document components of scholarly articles.

Abstract. Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks -grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence -are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders -front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.

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