Guest Editorial Ernesto Damiani', Valerio Elia', Mauro Madravio' Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Università di Milano, Italy edamiani,mmadravio@crema.unimi.it ISUFI, Università di Lecce, Italy valerio.elia@isufi.unile.it The eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) is the standard language for representing, exchanging and publishing information. XML-based formats for both data and metadata are increasingly used for supporting knowledge organization and agents' communication on the Internet, raising the need for techniques capable to extract and organize knowledge out of heterogeneous XML data. The idea of devoting a special issue of the Applied Computing Review to XML and Knowledge Management was born at the First European Workshop on XML and Knowledge Management, held at the Podere d'Ombriano in Crema, Italy during the summer of 2001. Our Workshop, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), the ACM Italian Chapter and held in cooperation with ACM, was a long waitedfor occasion for presenting work in progress and informally exchanging ideas among European computer scientists and researchers in humanities and innovation studies. Discussion showed that while the computer science research community was concerned with computational and architectural issues about XML-based metadata, humanities and innovation experts were building novel XML-based application for text and multimedia content management that could really benefit from interdisciplinary discussion and cooperation on knowledge representation techniques. The Crema meeting proved to be so fruitful in fostering such cooperation that many participants suggested selecting a limited number of the best papers for publication in the Applied Computing Review. One of us (E. Damiani) was asked by the Workshop Program Committee to guest-edit this publication; as active researchers respectively in the knowledge management for innovation and in the XML metadata formats areas, V. Elia and M. Madravio were later involved in organizing this special issue. The selection procedure worked as follows: the authors of the papers that in our opinion best represented the different research approaches presented at the workshop were invited to submit an extended and updated version of their paper. All submitted papers were carefully reviewed for both their originality and their appeal to nonspecialists. We like to think that the papers collected in this special issue of the Applied Computing Review capture several open problems and interesting results in knowledge management research. Also, we hope that, while attaining full scientific rigourousness, the papers still reflect the spirit of the lively interdisciplinary discussion that took place at the workshop. Finally, we would like to thank the Workshop Program Committee (namely Dino Buzzetti, Ernesto Damiani, Gianni Degli Antoni and Paolo Fezzi) for setting up the event and for their friendly advice. Thanks are also due to the ACR Editor in Chief, Giancarlo Succi, and to Aldo Romano for their valuable comments and encouragement.

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