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This paper aims to describe the main challenges of identifying and accessing useful information and knowledge about natural hazards and disasters results. The paper presents a grid‐based digital library system designed to address the challenges.

The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange of metadata.

Using grid technology allows the RDF metadata of European research results in the field of natural disasters to be shared securely and effectively in a heterogeneous network environment.

A metadata approach is proposed for the extraction of the metadata, and their distribution to third parties in batch, and their sharing with other applications can be a quickly process. Furthermore, a method is set out to describe metadata in a common and open format, which can become a widely accepted standard; the existence of a common standard enables the metadata storage in different platforms while supporting the capability of distributed queries across different metadata databases, the integration of metadata extracted from different sources, etc. It can be used for the general‐purpose search engines.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the special issue on the Semantic Web. Intensive research has been undertaken worldwide in research centres and several achievements have been accomplished towards the ultimate objective: the expression and the exploitation of humanity's collective knowledge.

A multi‐fold strategy for the preparation of this special issue was deployed. Given the special characteristics, a balanced mix of introductory papers to the topic, and also advanced research papers at the leading edge of Semantic Web evolution, were selected.

The paper summarizes the articles of the issue and also provides help in understanding the Semantic Web Roadmap of Digital Libraries.

Introduces the papers in the special issue.