Organizations

National library of the United States; it created the MARC formats in the 1960s and BIBFRAME to replace them.

American daily newspaper, founded in 1851; in 2009 it published its subject headings as linked open data.

English research university; Wendy Hall's group there worked on hypermedia and Web Science.

Private research university in California whose biomedical informatics group develops Protégé.

German university where Christian Bizer's group runs Web Data Commons.

Institution founded by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in Brussels to collect and index the world's knowledge on index cards. Its archive is now kept in Mons.

British public service broadcaster, an early large-scale publisher of Linked Data.

Worldwide organisation of museums and museum professionals, founded in 1946; its documentation committee, CIDOC, wrote the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.

Research institute in Menlo Park, California, founded as Stanford Research Institute, where Engelbart's lab built NLS.

International Organization for Standardization, which publishes GQL and Topic Maps.

European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, where Tim Berners-Lee proposed and built the World Wide Web.

US Defense Department research agency, which funded the DAML programme and earlier funded Engelbart's work.

Global library cooperative in Dublin, Ohio, which publishes the Dewey Decimal Classification and hosted the first Dublin Core workshop.

Not-for-profit organisation, begun in 1974 as the Uniform Code Council and joined by the European Article Numbering Association, that maintains the barcode numbering standards used on retail products worldwide, and the GS1 Web Vocabulary and GS1 Digital Link that carry them onto the Web.

American software company, where Jean Paoli co-edited XML 1.0, its research lab published GraphRAG in 2024, and R.V. Guha moved from Google that year.

American computer company where HyperCard and the Meta Content Framework were developed.

American research consortium in Austin, Texas, which hosted the Cyc project from 1984 until 1994.

Supercomputer company co-founded by Danny Hillis that built the Connection Machine.

Art-history research institute in Los Angeles, founded in 1985, that compiles the Getty Vocabularies.

Database and Linked Data software company founded by Kingsley Idehen; it develops Virtuoso.

Austin company founded by Doug Lenat to continue developing Cyc after it left MCC.

Standards body for geographic information, founded in 1994 as the OpenGIS Consortium; it publishes WMS, GML, KML and GeoSPARQL.

American web browser company, where RSS 0.90 was created in 1999.

American online retailer and cloud provider, founded in 1994; it has owned IMDb since 1998.

International standards body for the Web, founded at MIT in 1994. It publishes the specifications it calls Recommendations, including RDF, OWL and SPARQL.

Non-profit digital library in San Francisco that runs the Wayback Machine and Open Library.

Non-profit created in 1997 to develop and govern the DOI system.

American search and technology company that bought Freebase and co-founded schema.org.

Industry-sponsored research centre at MIT, opened in 1999, that designed a system of RFID tags and product numbers for tracking goods; MIT licensed the system to GS1.

Not-for-profit consortium, formed in 1999 with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' help, that develops and publishes the XBRL standard.

Publishers' association launched in early 2000 to link citations across journals with DOIs; the largest DOI registration agency for scholarly work.

Non-profit founded in 2001 that publishes free, standard copyright licences, so creators can grant permissions in advance; the licences come with machine-readable metadata.

Non-profit that hosts Wikipedia, Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects.

American social media company, formerly Facebook, where GraphQL was developed.

Non-profit that has run MusicBrainz since the end of 2004 and funds it by selling commercial access to its live data feed, while the core data stays in the public domain.

Non-profit founded in Britain in 2004 to promote open knowledge and open data; it maintains the Open Definition and, through Open Data Commons, the Open Database License.

Web standards group founded in 2004 by Apple, Mozilla and Opera after a W3C workshop voted down their proposal; since 2019 it has been the sole publisher of the HTML and DOM standards.

German Wikimedia chapter, which developed and launched Wikidata.

Company co-founded by Danny Hillis that built Freebase. Google bought it in July 2010.

Non-profit registered in England and Wales, set up in April 2006 to support OpenStreetMap; it is funded mostly by donations.

Fan-run non-profit founded in 2007 to preserve fan works and defend them as legitimate; it runs Archive of Our Own and the Fanlore wiki.

Association of Europe's electricity transmission system operators, founded in 2008–2009, and a major contributor to the European profiles of the electricity grid's Common Information Model.

Project founded by Dan Whaley in 2011 as a non-profit to build an open annotation layer over the Web; its tool lets anyone annotate any page, publicly or in groups. Development moved to a public benefit corporation in 2019.

London non-profit co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt to promote open data.

Swiss foundation set up in 2014 to run the Legal Entity Identifier system: it accredits the organisations that issue LEIs and publishes the global LEI data, including as linked data.

Open-source research and development company founded by Juan Benet in May 2014; it develops IPFS.

Company co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce to build products on Solid.

American AI company that introduced the Model Context Protocol in 2024.

Standards body formed in February 2021 by Adobe, Microsoft and others to certify the source and editing history of media content.

Public benefit company incorporated by Jay Graber in October 2021 to develop Bluesky and AT Protocol independently of Twitter.

Research institute founded by Paul Allen; its first grant helped fund Wikidata's initial development in 2012.

Company founded by Manu Sporny that builds software for Linked Data, digital credentials and identity.

Financial-industry association for data management that owns the Financial Industry Business Ontology and, since 2023, runs its development, after co-hosting it with the Object Management Group.

American private foundation set up by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty; one of the three funders of Wikidata's initial development in 2012.

Independent research lab working on tools for thought and local-first software; it published the 2019 local-first essay.

International organisation of archives and archivists, which sets the standards for archival description, from ISAD(G) to Records in Contexts.

Payments company whose 2015 gift to MIT supported the development of Solid.

UN body, under the Economic Commission for Europe, that maintains EDIFACT and other standards for trade documents and electronic business.