Semantic structuring of documents

This paper presents a formal model for an explicit description of the semantic structure which implicitly exists with documents. This model relies on content meaning description of document elements. Meaning representation is distributed in the overall architecture model: it binds a semantic structure, a logical structure of documents and a domain model. The semantic structure contains two levels of description: meaning representation of information units. The description logic formalism is used to represent semantics of document elements and document rhetorical organisation. This paper shows how semantic structuring of documents can be efficiently defined using SGML syntax. Using this documents structuring norm, one can define two levels of description: generic semantic structure (vs. Document Type Definition) and specific semantic structure (vs. instantiated document) in order to define an abstract interface to the information stored in documents. The medical patient record has been presented as a relevant example for handling semantic structured documents.