  This paper is concerned with tracking and interpreting scholarly documents in
distributed research communities. We argue that current approaches to document
description, and current technological infrastructures particularly over the
World Wide Web, provide poor support for these tasks. We describe the design of
a digital library server which will enable authors to submit a summary of the
contributions they claim their documents makes, and its relations to the
literature. We describe a knowledge-based Web environment to support the
emergence of such a community-constructed semantic hypertext, and the services
it could provide to assist the interpretation of an idea or document in the
context of its literature. The discussion considers in detail how the approach
addresses usability issues associated with knowledge structuring environments.
