-We believe that the best way to present a narrative to a computer is to let the author explicitly create a rich semantic structure for the article during writing. – We propose an open-standard, widely (re)useable format, the ABCDE format for proceedings and workshop contributions that can be easily mined, integrated and consumed by semantic browsers and wikis. – There need not be an abstract in an ABCDE document - instead, the author denotes core sentences within the B,C and D sections, which are compiled through a macro to form a structured abstract. – We believe a LATEX stylesheet provides a suitable input format for providing authors with a semantic structure to work from. – We provide the abcde.sty LATEX file as an appendix to this paper. – Macros are provided to specify Dublin Core Elements, and to print a list of those that are specified. – Our section division into Background, Contribution, and Discussion is backed by a number of emperical studies. – We aim to work on different incarnations of this format and open it up to modification and development.