Governance

Who decides, who may use it, and on what terms?

tension: Openness against control: who sets the standard, who owns the data, and the licences that say what others may do with it.
also: Openness, Licensing, Policy, Standards process
scheme: design issues

Threads (11)

Long-running problems under this issue, told step by step. All threads.

Can the Web forget? 1998–2019 open 8 steps
Should what is published about a person stay findable forever, or can they have it removed?
On what terms may anyone reuse it? 2005–2026 reopened 10 steps
What licence, if any, should published data carry, and who gets to set the terms of its reuse?
Who controls data about me? 2002–2026 open 8 steps
Can people decide what happens to data about them, and can machines read and respect those decisions?
Who owns what the crowd built? 1998–2025 open 8 steps
When volunteers build a database together, what stops whoever hosts it from closing it, selling it or shutting it down?
Who sets the standard? 2001–2024 open 8 steps
Who gets to decide the Web's data standards: a consortium, a grassroots community, or the largest consumers of the data?
Can readers write back? 1960–2018 open 7 steps
Can readers attach comments, corrections and links to someone else's page, where other readers will see them?
Central against decentralized 1964–2026 open 12 steps
Where should data live: with a few large hosts, or with the people and groups it belongs to?
One vocabulary or many 1984–2016 open 9 steps
Should everyone share one ontology, reuse a few common vocabularies, or map between many local ones?
Who issues your name online? 2000–2026 open 11 steps
Should people be known online by accounts that platforms issue, or by names they control themselves?
Who pays for public data infrastructure? 1995–2025 open 9 steps
Who pays to keep shared identifiers, query services and knowledge bases running after the launch money is spent?
Who runs the registry? 1957–2026 open 10 steps
When everyone depends on one set of identifiers, who issues them, on what terms, and what happens when the registry runs out, changes hands or closes its code?

Who answered it

This issue's row of the map: which traditions' works mainly answer it, and the earliest from each.

Works on this issue by tradition
tradition	works	earliest
Hypertext
Knowledge representation
Databases
Machine learning	2	Towards Making Systems Forget with Machine Unlearning 2015
Web standards	11	W3C Semantic Web Activity 2001
Search
Social web	5	PRISM 2007
Open knowledge	16	CelesTrak 1985
Decentralized web	1	DWeb Principles 2021
Libraries, archives and museums	1	FAIR data principles 2016
Life sciences	1	FAIR data principles 2016
Media	3	CDDB 1993
Geospatial	5	UN Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space 1962
Commerce and supply chain	1	Digital Product Passport 2024
Government and law	18	Database Directive 1996
Finance
Industry and engineering

11 of 17 traditions have taken up this question as a work's main issue; a work in several traditions counts in each. Same counts as the full map.

Timeline

Works on this question, its main or a secondary one, each shown once in date order; filter by tradition to follow one community. Bars run from start to end where both are known; marks people, projects and organizations still active. 4 entries have no date and are not shown. Hover over or focus an entry to draw its links. Scroll sideways, or use the decades above.

Lineage (40)

Works whose main question this is, by type, oldest first.

Concepts 4

Linked Open Data 2010 concept ★ seminal principle
Linked Data published under an open licence. Berners-Lee's 2010 five-star scheme rates open data from 'available in any format' up to 'linked to other data'.
FAIR data principles 2016 concept ★ seminal principle
Principles that research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, published in Scientific Data in March 2016.
CC signals 2025 concept principle
Framework proposed by Creative Commons in June 2025 for dataset holders to state, in machine-readable form, how they want their content reused by AI systems; partly legal and partly a social expectation.
Right to be forgotten concept principle
The right to have personal information removed from search results or erased by those who hold it, established for search engines by the EU Court of Justice in 2014 and as the right to erasure in Article 17 of the GDPR.

Writings 11

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 1999 writing ★ seminal principle
1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on how the Internet is regulated, arguing that software architecture ('code') constrains behaviour much as law, markets and norms do.
W3C Patent Policy 2004 writing principle
W3C policy adopted on 5 February 2004 so that its Recommendations can be implemented on a royalty-free basis: participants commit to license patents essential to a specification without charge.
8 Principles of Open Government Data 2007 writing ★ seminal principle
Principles written by thirty open-government advocates meeting in Sebastopol, California, on 7–8 December 2007: government data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, non-discriminatory, non-proprietary and licence-free.
Information Accountability 2008 writing ★ seminal principle
2008 Communications of the ACM article by Weitzner, Abelson, Berners-Lee, Feigenbaum, Hendler and Sussman arguing that the Web should make the use of information accountable to rules, rather than rely on hiding and access control alone.
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age 2009 writing ★ seminal principle
2009 book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger arguing that digital memory has made forgetting the exception, and proposing expiration dates for stored information.
NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others 2013 writing
Guardian article of June 2013 by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, based on documents from Edward Snowden, revealing the PRISM programme.
Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González 2014 writing ★ seminal principle
Judgment of the EU Court of Justice of 13 May 2014 (C-131/12) holding that search engines must, on request, remove links to information about a person that is inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.
Towards Making Systems Forget with Machine Unlearning 2015 writing
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy paper by Yinzhi Cao and Junfeng Yang that named machine unlearning: removing the effect of particular training data from a learned model without retraining it from scratch.
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach 2018 writing
Observer and Guardian article of March 2018 by Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison reporting that a political consultancy obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users through a quiz app; Facebook then restricted what apps could read.
DWeb Principles 2021 writing principle
Five principles for a decentralized web, written by the DWeb community with dozens of contributors from technology, organizing, academia, policy and the arts: technology for human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity and ecological awareness. First shown at the February 2021 DWeb meetup and offered as 'a starting point, not an end point'.
W3C Workshop Report: The Future of ODRL 2026 writing principle
Report of the W3C workshop held in London in July 2026, which reached consensus on a new W3C Working Group for ODRL 3.0: policies that are machine-actionable across sectors, with stronger formal semantics, conformance rules and a test suite, working with standards for identity, provenance, legal information and data spaces.

Standards 7

Platform for Privacy Preferences 2002–2018 standard
W3C Recommendation of 16 April 2002 for websites to state, in machine-readable form, what they do with visitors' data, so browsers could compare it with users' preferences. Few sites or browsers implemented it, and the W3C made it obsolete in 2018.
Open Definition 2005 standard ★ seminal
Open Knowledge Foundation's definition of 'open' for content and data: anyone can freely access, use, modify and share it, subject at most to requirements that preserve provenance and openness. First drafted in 2005.
ccREL 2008 standard
Creative Commons' RDF vocabulary for describing licences and attaching them to works, written into web pages with RDFa; submitted to the W3C in May 2008.
CC0 2009 standard
Creative Commons tool, released in 2009, by which a rightsholder waives all copyright and database rights in a work as far as the law allows, putting it in effect into the public domain. Wikidata's structured data is published under it.
ODRL 2018 standard
Policy language for stating permissions, prohibitions and duties over content and data; the W3C's ODRL Information Model 2.2 became a Recommendation in February 2018.
Data Privacy Vocabulary 2022 standard
Vocabulary for describing how personal and other data is processed, why and on what legal basis, made by a W3C community group from 2018; version 1 was published in December 2022. It is designed to support legal requirements such as the GDPR.
Open Database License standard
Open Data Commons' copyleft licence for databases: anyone may share, adapt and use a database as long as adapted versions stay open. OpenStreetMap moved to it in 2012.

Projects 18

UN Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space 1962 project
The UN's register of space objects, kept since the early 1960s and, under the 1974 Registration Convention, filled by launching states with each object's designator, launch date and site, basic orbit and function. It depends on states reporting, so it lags and has gaps.
CelesTrak 1985 project
T. S. Kelso's service, begun as a bulletin board in 1985, that republishes the US military's satellite catalogue and orbital elements for the public; it is now a non-profit.
CDDB c. 1993 project
Database of CD track listings, started by Ti Kan around 1993 and filled by users who believed it would stay free. It was sold in 1998, renamed Gracenote in 2000 and moved to proprietary terms, which provoked the freedb fork and MusicBrainz.
Database Directive 1996 project
EU directive of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, which created a separate 'sui generis' right for database makers alongside copyright; it is why open data licences such as ODbL and CC0 also deal with database rights.
MusicBrainz 2000 project ★ seminal
Open, volunteer-edited database of music metadata, launched in 2000 in reaction to CDDB's enclosure. Its core data has been in the public domain since 2003, and its identifiers anchor the Music Ontology, BBC Music and Wikidata's music items.
Wikipedia 2001 project ★ seminal
Free, collaboratively written online encyclopedia launched on 15 January 2001 and run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its infoboxes and links are the raw material of DBpedia, YAGO and Wikidata.
W3C Semantic Web Activity 2001–2013 project
W3C programme that ran the Semantic Web standards work from February 2001, replacing the Metadata Activity, until it was subsumed into the broader Data Activity in December 2013.
PSI Directive 2003 project
EU directive of 2003 setting minimum rules for re-using public sector information, which made re-use of government data a legal matter across the EU; revised in 2013 and recast in 2019 as the Open Data Directive.
Space-Track 2004 project
The US Space Force's website for orbital data on tracked objects, open to registered users since 2004; classified and military objects are withheld or obscured.
OpenStreetMap 2004 project ★ seminal
Volunteer-made map of the world, started in 2004 because Britain's Ordnance Survey would not release its data under a free licence. Its features carry free-form key=value tags, a folksonomy steered by a wiki, and its data moved to the share-alike ODbL in 2012.
PRISM 2007 project
US National Security Agency programme, begun in 2007, that collected internet communications from major US companies including Google, Facebook and Apple; disclosed in June 2013 from documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
INSPIRE 2007 project
EU directive of 14 March 2007 requiring member states to publish their environmental spatial data in common, interoperable forms, building a shared European spatial data infrastructure.
The Movie Database 2008 project
Community-built film and television database, started in 2008, whose free API made it the usual open alternative to IMDb for apps.
Data.gov 2009 project
United States government open data portal, launched in May 2009 by federal CIO Vivek Kundra to publish machine-readable datasets from federal agencies.
data.gov.uk 2010 project
UK government open data portal, built under Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt and publicly launched in January 2010.
W3C Data Activity 2013 project
Broader W3C programme on data on the Web that took over the Semantic Web Activity's groups in December 2013.
General Data Protection Regulation 2016 project
EU regulation on personal data, adopted on 14 April 2016 and applied from 25 May 2018, which gives people rights over data about them and binds anyone processing it; it set off machine-readable work on consent and data-processing records.
Digital Product Passport 2024 project
EU scheme under the 2024 Ecodesign Regulation giving products a digital record of what they are made of and how to repair and recycle them, reached through a QR code; batteries are first, from February 2027, and an EU registry opened in July 2026.

Also bears on this (30)

Concepts 3

Kessler syndrome 1978 concept vision
The risk that debris in low Earth orbit reaches a density where collisions create more debris faster than it decays, making orbits unusable: a tragedy of the commons in space.
Personal data store concept technique
Storage that a person controls, from which applications read and write data with permission, instead of each application keeping its own copy.
Self-sovereign identity concept principle
Approach to digital identity in which people hold and control their own identifiers and credentials instead of relying on a central provider.

Writings 7

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice 2006 writing ★ seminal principle
Book edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom applying Ostrom's research on how communities sustain shared resources to knowledge: digital libraries, open access, open-source software and the rules that keep them from being depleted or enclosed.
Long Live the Web 2010 writing principle
Tim Berners-Lee's 2010 Scientific American essay defending the Web's design principles, including decentralization, and warning that large social-networking sites were walling users' information off from the rest of the Web.
Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase 2014 writing
Communications of the ACM article by Vrandečić and Krötzsch introducing Wikidata's design and goals.
Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web 2015 writing ★ seminal vision
Brewster Kahle's talk to the NetGain gathering at the Ford Foundation. He argues that the Web is fragile and lets readers be tracked and censored, that 'the way we code the Web will determine the way we live online', and calls for a peer-to-peer Web with no central host.
From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration 2016 writing ★ seminal
WWW 2016 paper on moving Freebase's data into Wikidata after Google announced in December 2014 that it would close Freebase: what could be carried over, what could not, and why a company's knowledge base did not simply transfer to a community one.
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity 2016 writing principle
Christopher Allen's essay setting out ten principles for digital identity controlled by the individual.
Report of the W3C Workshop on Web Standardization for Graph Data 2019 writing debate
Report of a W3C workshop held in Berlin in March 2019 that brought the RDF, property-graph and SQL communities together. It backed a property-graph query language developed alongside SQL (GQL) and discussed extending RDF to make statements about statements.

Standards 9

Satellite Catalog Number 1957 standard
Sequential number given by the US military to every object it tracks in orbit, starting with Sputnik 1's rocket (1) and satellite (2). It ran out of five digits on 11 July 2026, forcing the 'Alpha-5' workaround and a move to nine-digit formats.
PICS 1996 standard ★ seminal
Platform for Internet Content Selection: W3C labels describing the content of web pages, made to let parents filter what children see; the label specification became a Recommendation on 31 October 1996. The RDF specification calls it a predecessor of RDF.
HTML microdata 2009 standard
Attributes for nesting machine-readable data in HTML, added to the WHATWG's HTML specification in 2009 as a simpler alternative to RDFa and microformats; schema.org launched with it in 2011.
EIDR 2010 standard
The film and television industry's registry of identifiers, founded in October 2010 by MovieLabs, CableLabs, Comcast and Rovi. Every title, edit and version gets a DOI, so studios, broadcasters and streaming services can refer to the same thing.
Schema.org 2011 standard ★ seminal
Shared vocabulary for structured data in web pages, launched in 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo, with Yandex joining later that year.
Legal Entity Identifier 2012 standard
20-character identifier for every company, fund or government body that takes part in financial transactions, defined in ISO 17442. The G20 called for it in 2011 after the 2008 crisis showed that regulators could not tell who was exposed to whom; the first LEIs were issued in December 2012. Its records say who is who and who owns whom, and are published openly, including as RDF.
Financial Instrument Global Identifier 2014 standard
Open identifier for financial instruments of every kind, from shares to currencies; it began as Bloomberg's open symbology in 2009 and became an Object Management Group standard in 2014, free to use, unlike most proprietary securities codes.
DCAT 2014 standard
W3C vocabulary for describing datasets in data catalogues, used by government open-data portals; a Recommendation since January 2014.
Linked Web Storage Protocol 2026 standard
W3C specification, a first public draft since March 2026, for giving applications secure, permissioned access to data people store elsewhere, in an interoperable way.

Projects 11

IMDb 1990 project ★ seminal
Database of films, television and the people who make them. It began in October 1990 as fan lists on the rec.arts.movies newsgroup, became a company in 1996 and was bought by Amazon in 1998; its data is proprietary, released only for non-commercial use, yet other databases link to its title and name IDs.
Facebook 2004 project
Social network launched in February 2004. Its profiles, pages and 'Log in with Facebook' made a Facebook account a de facto identifier for people and organizations, and its Open Graph protocol turned web pages into objects in its own graph.
Twitter 2006 project
Microblogging service launched in 2006, renamed X in 2023. Its usernames serve as identifiers for people and organizations on about 467,000 Wikidata items; it ended free access to its API in February 2023.
OBO Foundry 2007 project
Collective of biomedical ontology developers who share principles for building interoperable ontologies; it has led the OBO effort since 2007.
Rich Snippets 2009 project ★ seminal
Google search feature announced in May 2009 that shows ratings, prices and other details in results, read from microformats and RDFa in pages.
Archive of Our Own 2009 project
Fan-fiction archive run by the Organization for Transformative Works, open since November 2009. Writers tag freely, and volunteer tag wranglers link the tags to canonical ones, a working middle way between taxonomy and folksonomy; it won a Hugo Award in 2019.
Wikidata 2012 project ★ seminal
Free, collaboratively edited knowledge graph run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It supplies structured data to Wikipedia and the sameAs links on this site.
what3words 2013 project
Proprietary system, launched in July 2013, that names every 3-metre square on Earth with three words. Widely adopted by British emergency services, it is criticised for its closed, patented algorithm, takedowns of reimplementations and addresses that are easily confused.
Solid c. 2015 project ★ seminal
Tim Berners-Lee's project for storing personal data in user-controlled 'pods' that apps read and write through Linked Data standards.
DWeb 2016 project
Community of the people, projects and protocols building a decentralized web. It grew out of Brewster Kahle's 2015 call to 'lock the Web open': the Internet Archive held Decentralized Web Summits in 2016 and 2018, then DWeb Camp from 2019, with local nodes in cities worldwide.
TraCSS 2024 project
The US Office of Space Commerce's civil service for space situational awareness, which began sending collision warnings to beta users through Space-Track in September 2024; it moves basic space-traffic data from the military to a civil agency.

People and organizations (43)

Linked to works on this question; the number counts those works.

World Wide Web Consortium (6) · Creative Commons (3) · Tim Berners-Lee (3) · Hal Abelson (2) · Open Knowledge Foundation (2) · Ben Adida · Carole Cadwalladr · Daniel Weitzner · Emma Graham-Harrison · Eric Miller · Ewen MacAskill · Gerald Jay Sussman · Glenn Greenwald · Harshvardhan J. Pandit · Internet Archive · Ivan Herman · Jim Hendler · Jimmy Wales · Joan Feigenbaum · John Ryan · Joseph Reagle · Junfeng Yang · Larry Sanger · Lawrence Lessig · Lorrie Cranor · Mai Ishikawa Sutton · Marc Langheinrich · Martin Presler-Marshall · Massimo Marchiori · MetaBrainz Foundation · Mike Linksvayer · Nathan Yergler · Nigel Shadbolt · OpenStreetMap Foundation · Renato Iannella · Robert Kaye · Serena Villata · Steve Coast · Ti Kan · T. S. Kelso · Viktor Mayer-Schönberger · Wikimedia Foundation · Yinzhi Cao