A huge amount of organizational information is encoded and formalized in unstructured documents. Due to their intrinsic characteristics, management of unstructured documents presents critical issues: difficult information search and retrieval, poor interoperability among information systems, poor reuse of content, as well as of business information, related to the document context of use in organizations. The objective of this work is to address these issues, by proposing a Metadata Model, called DMSML (Document Management and Sharing Markup Language). DMSML aims to represent a set of document properties, which are relevant to document management and render business and organizational information explicit, in a way which promotes information reuse, user—driven extensibilitv and interoperability with heterogeneous systems. DMSML is a comprehensive model for Document Management. encompassing descriptive, collaboration and process characteristics of unstructured documents. The DMSML specification is based on a three—layered modeling approach, promoting human understanding of the metadata specification (Conceptual Layer), logical data modeling (Logical Layer) and machine understanding and interoperability with other applications (XML Schema—based Physical Layer). DMSML supports the conception of a completely declarative approach for the design and automatic deployment of Document Management Systems. The use and proper adaptation of DMSML enable to configure a DMS according to the specific requirements of an organization, providing specific methods and mechanisms to exploit the business knowledge detained by the end users, and leveraging on die conipliance with technical and business metadata standards. The work includes the design of a DMSML Framework prototype, which provides the user with instrumental support for the adaptation and use of the metadata set and design, deployment and operation of a Document Management System.