Abstract Governments and public administrations often have definition authority for the meaning of terms through legalistic processes and documents as well as through their position on. Many of these definitions are used to create and interpret forms which are typically used for documenting, supporting and guiding processes of public administrations. Such forms also represent the interface for citizens and enterprises to administration procedures. We propose the use of ontologies to help organizing and documenting this knowledge and to describe the relationships between concepts and terms. These ontologies can then be used to provide semantic underpinnings of the terms used in document structures, in particular in structured and semistrucured documents (forms) especially those using XML to describe the document structure.