Description logics for documentation

Much of the activity in a digital library revolves around collecting, organizing and publishing knowledge about the resources of the library, in the form of metadata records. In order to document such activity, digital librarians need to express knowledge about the metadata records they produce. This knowledge, which we call documentation knowledge, may express e.g., provenance, trustability, or access restrictions of the records. Today, documentation knowledge is mostly represented in digital libraries via RDF. We propose a new type of information system, called documentation system, as a basic component of a digital library allowing to represent and reason about both domain and documentation knowledge in an expressive language such as OWL.