We give a general overview of the European Esprit project CONCERTO. The central idea of CONCERTO is to represent the ‘meaning’ of digital documents making use of their associated ‘conceptual annotations’: a conceptual annotation is intended to supply a computer-usable description of the main information elements of the whole document or of a part of it. We evoke first the general context (‘metadata’) of CONCERTO; we describe then its architecture, and we give a concrete example, of conceptual annotation.