In this paper we give a detailed exposition of some of the results announced in [18]. The primary motivation for this work is Witt's observation [31, Satz 7] that if F is a field of characteristic #72, his ring 1V(F) of classes of anisotropic quadratic forms may be written as Z[G]/K where G is an abelian group of exponent two (actually G =F*/F*2), Z[G] is the integral group ring of G, and K is an ideal of Z[G] generated by elements of the form gl + g2-g3g4 and 1 + g5 with gi in G. Of course these elements can be described more explicitly, but for our purposes the only information we need about K is that any homomorphism of Z[G] -> Z sends K to 0 or to an ideal of the form 2nZ. In this introduction we shall call any ideal of Z[G] with this property "admissible." In [26], Pfister proved certain structure theorems for IV(F) usilg his theory of multiplicative forms. His proofs were simplified in [11, 22, 23, 29, 30]. Harrison [11] and Leicht and Lorenz [22] gave important complements to Pfister's results concerning the ideal theory of WV(F). The main goal of our paper is to understand and generalize these structure theorems using standard techniques of commutative algebra. In [28] and [3], Scharlau and Belskii have introduced and studied Witt and Witt-Grothendieck rings for profinite groups. Their definitions generalize the usual notions of Wit.t rings, WV(F), and Witt-Grothendieck rings, K (F), of quadratic forms over fields of characteristic #72. These rings also have the form Z[G]/K with G an abelian group of exponent two and K an admissible ideal of Z[G]. Here we are mainly iinterested in another generalization of 1V(F) and K(F), namely the Witt rings, IV(C, J), and the Witt-Grothendieck rings, K(C,J) of classes of hermitian forms over a connected commutative semilocal ring C with involution J. Since J may be the identity these include the Witt and Witt-Grothendieck rings of classes of symmetric bilinear forms