People

American librarian who published the Dewey Decimal Classification in 1876; the UDC was built on his numbers.

Belgian lawyer and politician who co-founded the Mundaneum and the Universal Decimal Classification with Paul Otlet, and won the 1913 Nobel Peace Prize.

Belgian bibliographer who planned a universal index of recorded knowledge and co-founded the Mundaneum with Henri La Fontaine.

American engineer and science administrator who directed US wartime research through the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and described the memex in 1945.

Indian mathematician and librarian who devised Colon Classification (1933), the first major faceted classification, and the five laws of library science.

American computer programmer and systems analyst who developed the MARC format at the Library of Congress in 1965–68.

American psychologist who founded WordNet at Princeton in 1985.

American engineer who, with Bernard Silver, patented the barcode in 1952.

British computer scientist at IBM who invented the relational model of data in 1969–1970, the basis of relational databases; he received the 1981 Turing Award.

American engineer who heard a grocery executive ask for a way to read product data at checkout, and with Norman Woodland filed the barcode patent in 1949.

American engineer whose Augmentation Research Center at SRI built NLS, shown in the 1968 'Mother of All Demos' with the mouse, hypertext and shared screens.

IBM engineer whose linear barcode design was chosen in 1973 as the Universal Product Code.

American engineer who at RAND in the early 1960s designed distributed, packet-switched communication networks meant to survive attack, an idea behind the ARPANET and the Internet.

American AI pioneer at MIT who proposed frames in 1974, a structure of slots and defaults that prefigures classes and properties in ontologies.

American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', created Lisp and proposed representing knowledge in formal logic.

American geographer and pioneer of computer cartography, whose 1970 paper stated the first law of geography.

American political economist who showed how communities govern shared resources without either state control or privatization; Nobel laureate in economics in 2009.

English geographer who studied the feasibility of computer mapping for Canada's land inventory in the early 1960s, leading to the Canada Geographic Information System; he is credited with coining the term 'geographic information system'.

American information technologist who coined the words 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' and has led Project Xanadu since 1960.

Canadian computer scientist and logician who formalized the closed-world assumption for databases in 1978.

American NASA astrophysicist who showed in 1978, with Burton Cour-Palais, that colliding satellites could create a self-sustaining debris belt.

American researcher in natural-language processing and knowledge representation, author of 'What's in a Link' (1975).

British AI researcher at IHMC who edited RDF's model theory (RDF Semantics, 2004) and co-edited OWL's semantics.

British digital-humanities scholar who co-edited the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines with Michael Sperberg-McQueen, including P3 in 1994.

Taiwanese-American computer scientist who introduced the entity–relationship model in 1976, later at Carnegie Mellon and Louisiana State University.

Belgian engineer at CERN who worked with Tim Berners-Lee from 1990 on the World Wide Web proposal and its early development and promotion.

MIT computer scientist in artificial intelligence and programming languages since 1964; co-author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

American AI researcher who designed KL-ONE, the system from which description logics grew.

American AI researcher who began the Cyc project in 1984 to hand-encode common-sense knowledge, and founded Cycorp to continue it.

American linguist who later directed WordNet at Princeton.

Canadian AI researcher whose work with Ronald Brachman set out the trade-off between expressiveness and tractability in knowledge representation.

American programmer and photographer who wrote QuickDraw and MacPaint for the first Macintosh and created HyperCard at Apple. Atkinson dithering is named after him.

British computer scientist at the University of Southampton who worked on hypermedia before the Web and co-founded the field of Web Science.

American computer scientist who created the PGP encryption program in 1991 and set out the web of trust in its 1992 manual.

Computer scientist who led the W3C Semantic Web Activity after Eric Miller.

English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989–1990 and founded the World Wide Web Consortium.

Canadian software developer who co-edited XML 1.0 and, with R.V. Guha, the 1997 W3C note on expressing MCF in XML.

British professor of signal processing who founded Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music, and co-author of the Music Ontology paper.

Stanford biomedical informatician who built the first version of Protégé in 1987 and has led its development since.

American computer scientist, director of research at Google and co-author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'.

British computer scientist who led the building of data.gov.uk with Tim Berners-Lee and co-founded the Open Data Institute with him.

American inventor who designed the Connection Machine at Thinking Machines and co-founded Metaweb, which built the Freebase knowledge base.

German database researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, co-author of the YAGO paper (2007).

American AI researcher who co-wrote 'The Semantic Web' (2001) and, as a DARPA programme manager, ran the DAML programme that fed into OWL.

Yale computer scientist working on cryptography, privacy and computer science and law; co-author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

British computer scientist at Oxford whose work on description logics shaped OWL; he co-edited OWL's formal semantics.

American computer scientist whose 1993 paper gave the much-quoted definition of an ontology as 'an explicit specification of a conceptualization'. He later co-founded Siri.

American businessman who co-founded Alexa Internet with Brewster Kahle and, with him, developed the Wayback Machine.

American computer scientist who co-wrote 'Ontology Development 101' and co-edited the W3C's 2004 OWL overview.

Dutch computer scientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who co-edited the W3C's 2004 OWL overview.

Dutch computer scientist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the main developer of SWI-Prolog; co-author of sameAs.cc (2018).

American computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and was one of Open Library's creators.

American legal scholar who co-founded Creative Commons in 2001 and has written on how law and code regulate the Internet.

Programmer who created CDDB around 1993 as the track-listing database for his xmcd CD player, filled by users' e-mailed submissions.

American writer on the Internet whose 2003 essay argued that the Semantic Web rests on syllogistic logic that does not fit how people describe the world.

American programmer who co-founded Metaweb, the company behind Freebase, with Danny Hillis and John Giannandrea in 2005.

Scottish computer scientist who co-founded Metaweb in 2005; he had worked at Netscape and later worked at Google and Apple.

Indian computer scientist whose work runs from Cyc through Apple's Meta Content Framework and Netscape's RSS to schema.org, which he started at Google.

American computer scientist who defined REST in his 2000 dissertation and was a principal author of the HTTP/1.1 specification.

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software and a chief architect of its Virtuoso server, which publishes DBpedia.

American internet entrepreneur who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001.

Technologist who was one of the founders of microformats, with Tantek Çelik.

English film enthusiast who wrote the search scripts that began IMDb on Usenet in 1990, and who has run it as a company since 1996.

British technologist who, while at Procter & Gamble, coined the term 'Internet of Things' in 1999 and helped start MIT's Auto-ID Center, becoming its executive director.

Swiss software engineer who founded GeoNames in 2005.

American philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and named it.

Head of Google Search who announced the Google Knowledge Graph in 2012 with the post 'things, not strings'.

American programmer who co-edited Activity Streams 2.0 and is listed as an author of ActivityPub.

Spanish computer scientist at the University of Oviedo who co-designed Shape Expressions (ShEx) for validating RDF.

American programmer who founded MusicBrainz in 2000 as an open alternative to CDDB, and led it and the MetaBrainz Foundation until his death in 2026.

One of the University of Maryland developers of SHOE, an early ontology language for the Web (around 1996).

American computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who studies usable privacy and security; she co-authored P3P while at AT&T Labs and later served as the US Federal Trade Commission's chief technologist.

Canadian-British writer and activist whose essay 'Metacrap' (2001) argued that people will not supply honest, careful metadata.

Computer scientist at the University of Mannheim who co-founded DBpedia and leads Web Data Commons.

American computer scientist who co-founded Google and devised PageRank.

American computer scientist who co-founded Google and co-wrote the 1998 paper describing it.

French researcher at the Université de Lyon who co-edited JSON-LD 1.1 with Gregg Kellogg and Dave Longley.

Computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who co-founded DBpedia in 2007 and co-wrote its founding paper.

German computer scientist who co-founded DBpedia in 2007 and later directed TIB, Germany's national library of science and technology.

Croatian computer scientist who co-developed Semantic MediaWiki and Wikidata, and since 2020 has worked at the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia.

British economist who co-founded the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004.

British programmer who started OpenStreetMap in 2004 at University College London.

German computer scientist who co-created Semantic MediaWiki and Wikidata with Denny Vrandečić; he works on knowledge representation at TU Dresden.

German computer scientist who has been product manager for Wikidata at Wikimedia Deutschland since its early years.

Software developer who co-edited ActivityPub, the W3C's 2018 standard for decentralised social networking.

American programmer and activist who helped write the RSS 1.0 specification as a teenager, led early work on Open Library, and co-founded Reddit.

Belgian computer scientist at Ghent University working on decentralized Web technology; lead author of Triple Pattern Fragments (2016).

American computer scientist who created IPFS and founded Protocol Labs in 2014.

American software engineer who led the Bluesky project from 2021, incorporated it as Bluesky Social, and was its CEO until March 2026.

Web developer who edited the W3C Webmention Recommendation (2017).

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

Semantic Web researcher at the University of Chile and lead author of the 2021 survey 'Knowledge Graphs'.

Co-author of 'Industry-scale Knowledge Graphs: Lessons and Challenges' (2019).

Machine-learning researcher, co-author of the TransE paper (2013).

Machine learning researcher, first author of the 2012 AlexNet paper.

Co-editor of the SKOS Reference (2009).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON.

Israeli-American computer scientist working on data integration; co-author of 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data' (2009).

Web researcher listed as an author of ActivityPub, and later a co-editor of Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0.

Co-author of 'Industry-scale Knowledge Graphs: Lessons and Challenges' (2019).

Co-author of 'The Anatomy of a Nanopublication' (2010).

RDF software developer who co-edited SPARQL while at HP Labs in Bristol.

Linked Data researcher who maintained the Linked Open Data cloud diagram with Richard Cyganiak.

Co-author of 'Industry-scale Knowledge Graphs: Lessons and Challenges' (2019).

Machine-learning researcher, lead author of the TransE paper (2013).

Australian National University computer scientist and editor of the W3C/OGC Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017).

Machine learning researcher, first author of 'Attention Is All You Need'.

Oracle engineer and editor of the W3C Linked Data Platform 1.0 (2015).

Co-editor of the 2008 RDFa specification, written at Creative Commons.

Developer, then at John Wiley & Sons, co-editor of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model.

Co-author of the LOV paper (2016) on cataloguing reusable Linked Data vocabularies.

American programmer who created LiveJournal and OpenID, co-wrote 'Thoughts on the Social Graph' and, at Google, launched the Social Graph API.

NASA scientist and co-author of the 1978 paper on collisions between artificial satellites.

Markup scholar who co-edited the Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines and XML 1.0.

Computer scientist, lead author of 'SPARQL Web-Querying Infrastructure: Ready for Action?' (2013).

British investigative journalist who reported the Cambridge Analytica story for the Observer and Guardian.

Certified public accountant from Tacoma, Washington, whose work from 1998 began XBRL.

American librarian and scholar of the knowledge commons, co-editor with Elinor Ostrom of 'Understanding Knowledge as a Commons'.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

American product designer who proposed the hashtag on Twitter in 2007.

Cryptography and identity technologist who co-wrote the TLS 1.0 specification, wrote 'The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity' (2016), and started the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops.

Chilean computer scientist at the Universidad de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

Technologist who co-created FOAF, co-edited RDF Schema, worked on RDF at the W3C and later on schema.org at Google.

Netscape engineer who co-created RSS 0.90 in 1999 and produced the simplified RSS 0.91 later that year.

American entrepreneur who founded the Hypothesis annotation project in 2011.

Co-editor of RDF Dataset Canonicalization (2024).

Technical University of Berlin researcher and editor of the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017).

Bluesky engineer and co-author of the 2024 paper describing Bluesky and AT Protocol.

Archivist and technologist who led the work at Berkeley in the early 1990s that produced Encoded Archival Description.

Director of MIT's Internet Policy Research Initiative, whose research is on systems that make the Web answerable to legal and policy rules; lead author of 'Information Accountability' (2008).

Microsoft Research scientist and lead author of the 2024 GraphRAG paper.

Developer at Digital Bazaar, listed as an author of JSON-LD 1.0 and DID 1.0 and as an editor of Verifiable Credentials 1.0.

Developer of RDF software, listed as an author of the Turtle Recommendation (2014).

Semantic web consultant who in November 2018 argued on the W3C semantic-web list that RDF is too hard for average developers and started the EasierRDF effort.

One of the University of Maryland developers of SHOE, an early ontology language for the Web (around 1996).

American programmer who worked on OpenID and co-wrote 'Thoughts on the Social Graph' in 2007; later at Facebook and the White House.

Anthropic engineer who co-created the Model Context Protocol.

American computer scientist and co-author, with Jim Hendler, of 'Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist'.

Greek computer scientist who co-edited SHACL (2017).

American software designer who co-created Apache Hadoop, as well as the search libraries Lucene and Nutch.

Digital identity specialist who co-edited the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification.

British journalist at the Guardian, co-author of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica report.

American publisher of public-domain books online, the plaintiff in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and a co-founder of Creative Commons.

American web designer and author, one of the three creators of XFN in 2003.

Worked on Web metadata at OCLC, where his conversations with Stuart Weibel led to Dublin Core, and later led the W3C Semantic Web Activity.

W3C staff member who co-edited the SPARQL query language, a W3C Recommendation since 2008.

OCLC researcher who developed the PURL concept with Stuart Weibel in 1995.

Developer listed as an author of ActivityPub.

Scottish journalist who co-reported the Snowden documents for the Guardian in 2013.

Computer scientist, now a professor at Télécom Paris, who created YAGO.

University of Bologna computer scientist who, with Monica Palmirani, created most of Akoma Ntoso's core vocabulary.

Co-editor of DCAT (2014).

Computer scientist in natural-language processing, research director at Google; co-author of 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data' (2009).

Canadian developer who co-edited the Music Ontology specification in 2007 and wrote its early revisions.

Co-editor of the Turtle Recommendation (2014).

British-Canadian computer scientist whose work on neural networks underlies deep learning; co-author of AlexNet.

Developer who co-founded DBpedia in 2007 and co-wrote its founding paper.

Researcher who co-authored the LOV paper (2016) on cataloguing reusable Linked Data vocabularies.

Computer scientist, co-author of the YAGO paper (2007).

American journalist who reported the Snowden documents, including PRISM, for the Guardian in 2013.

Invited expert who co-edited Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0 (2025).

Google machine learning scientist, co-author of the 2013 word2vec paper.

Software developer who co-edited JSON-LD 1.0 and later JSON-LD 1.1, and wrote widely used RDF tools in Ruby.

Dutch computer scientist at VU Amsterdam who co-chaired the W3C Web Ontology Working Group that produced OWL, with Jim Hendler.

MIT computer scientist, co-author of 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs', who co-founded Creative Commons and co-wrote ccREL.

Mayo Clinic informatics researcher who co-authored the Shape Expressions paper (2014).

Co-author of the SPINACH paper (2024) on question answering over Wikidata.

American computer scientist, lead author of 'When owl:sameAs Isn't the Same' (2010).

Researcher at Trinity College Dublin's AI Accountability Lab, previously at the ADAPT Centre, who chairs the W3C community group behind the Data Privacy Vocabulary and edits it.

Computer scientist at the University of Edinburgh, co-author of 'When owl:sameAs Isn't the Same' (2010).

German software developer at TopQuadrant who co-edited SHACL (2017).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON.

W3C staff member who co-edited Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One (2004).

AI researcher, co-author of AlexNet and later a co-founder of OpenAI.

Co-author of the SPINACH paper (2024) on question answering over Wikidata.

Researcher at Google, first author of BERT.

American computer scientist, co-author of the 1985 overview of KL-ONE.

Developer at IBM when he co-edited Activity Streams 2.0 with Evan Prodromou.

American computer scientist, co-author of 'When owl:sameAs Isn't the Same' (2010).

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

Dutch science publisher and co-author of 'The Anatomy of a Nanopublication' (2010).

Machine-learning researcher, co-author of the TransE paper (2013).

French computer scientist at Microsoft who co-edited XML 1.0.

American computer scientist at Google who co-designed MapReduce and co-wrote word2vec.

German computer scientist who co-founded DBpedia in 2007 and works on knowledge graphs and machine learning.

Semantic Web researcher, lead author of the Named Graphs paper (2005), which made sets of RDF statements nameable and signable.

Met Office data architect and editor of the joint W3C–OGC Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices.

French computer scientist at Inria who co-wrote Ontology Matching (2007) with Pavel Shvaiko.

Software developer who co-edited ActivityPub with Christine Lemmer-Webber.

Co-author of the SPINACH paper (2024) on question answering over Wikidata.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

Co-author of the PICS 1.1 label specification (1996). He edited it.

Computer scientist who works on identity links in Linked Data, including how to detect wrong owl:sameAs links; co-author of sameAs.cc (2018).

German computer scientist and database researcher who co-authored the 2009 paper on querying the Web of Linked Data by following links.

IBM engineer and editor of the W3C Linked Data Platform 1.0 (2015).

Irish engineer at the University of Galway who created SIOC and co-edited its specification.

Entrepreneur who co-founded Inrupt with Tim Berners-Lee in 2018.

Co-editor of DCAT (2014).

Geographic information scientist who co-edited the drafts of the OGC GeoSPARQL standard in 2011.

Member of the DWeb community who, with Mai Ishikawa Sutton, stewards the DWeb Principles and presented their first public version in 2021.

Head of e-services and strategy at the UK National Archives who led legislation.gov.uk with the aim of exposing the statute book as data as well as documents.

Computer scientist who edited a report on the Scheme language, worked at Science Commons on the CC0 dedication, and on the W3C TAG raised ISSUE-57 and wrote the 2012 call to amend the httpRange-14 resolution.

Chilean computer scientist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

W3C engineer, first author of the 2001 Annotea paper.

Researcher, then at the W3C and MIT, who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

American entrepreneur who founded the social bookmarking site Delicious in 2003.

Information scientist who studies classification in volunteer communities and named the curated folksonomy.

Columbia University computer scientist, co-author of the 2015 paper that named machine unlearning.

Computer scientist, co-author of 'SPARQL Web-Querying Infrastructure: Ready for Action?' (2013).

Anthropic engineer who co-created the Model Context Protocol.

Google engineer, co-author of the 2013 word2vec paper.

Natural language processing researcher at Google, co-author of BERT.

Australian National University data scientist and editor of the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017).

American programmer who started Discogs in 2000 while working at Intel.

Natural language processing researcher at Google, co-author of BERT.

Geographic information scientist, then at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who edited the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017) and GeoSPARQL 1.1 (2024).

American computer scientist and lead author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

One of the University of Maryland developers of SHOE, an early ontology language for the Web (around 1996).

Semantic Web researcher at DFKI who co-edited the W3C Note Cool URIs for the Semantic Web (2008).

British technologist who co-created the FOAF vocabulary with Dan Brickley in 2000 and later worked at BBC Research & Development.

Geonovum standards specialist and editor of the Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

Computer scientist who co-edited the PROV data model (2013) while at the University of Southampton.

Cognitive scientist whose 1960s models of semantic memory helped establish semantic networks as a way to represent meaning.

Organizer, editor and writer; as Associate Producer of DWeb Projects at the Internet Archive, a steward of the DWeb Principles.

DFKI researcher who built DBTropes, the linked data version of TV Tropes, and presented it at EKAW 2010 with Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes.

Technologist and founder of Digital Bazaar who edits JSON-LD and the W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers specifications.

Computer scientist, then at ETH Zurich, who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

Chilean computer scientist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-author of the formal semantics of SPARQL (2009).

Researcher at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid who co-authored the LOV paper (2016).

University of Toronto computer scientist and co-author of the Linked Movie Database.

W3C researcher, co-author of the 2001 Annotea paper.

Co-editor of the 2008 RDFa specification.

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

Computer scientist who co-edited JSON-LD 1.0 while at Graz University of Technology and created the Hydra vocabulary for web APIs.

Founder of Danube Tech and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification.

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON.

Information scientist who led the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and its harmonisation with FRBR.

German researcher in e-business who created the GoodRelations vocabulary for products and offers, which became schema.org's commerce vocabulary in 2012.

Computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead author of 'Scholarly Context Not Found' (2014).

Associate professor at the University of Cambridge working on local-first software and distributed systems; lead author of the 2024 Bluesky paper.

IBM engineer who co-authored the W3C's P3P specification.

Italian computer scientist who edited the W3C's P3P specification while at the W3C, MIT and the University of Venice.

American developer who co-founded WordPress and was one of the three creators of XFN in 2003.

Co-author of the 2019 paper introducing Google Dataset Search.

Oracle engineer who co-edited the OGC GeoSPARQL standard, from the 2011 drafts to version 1.1 (2024).

Huawei engineer and editor of the W3C Web of Things Thing Description (2020).

German computer scientist and co-author of the 2006 paper introducing Semantic MediaWiki.

Researcher at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne and editor of the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017).

Intel engineer and editor of the W3C Web of Things Thing Description (2020).

American computer scientist who co-created Apache Hadoop.

Creative Commons staff member who co-wrote ccREL (2008); later policy director at GitHub.

Researcher at Google, co-author of BERT.

University of Bologna professor of legal informatics who, with Fabio Vitali, created most of Akoma Ntoso's core vocabulary.

American computer scientist at Stanford, known for compilers and later for conversational agents grounded in knowledge bases; co-author of the SPINACH paper (2024).

American writer on how open-source software is produced and paid for, author of 'Roads and Bridges' (2016) and 'Working in Public' (2020); now publishes as Nadia Asparouhova.

Computer scientist who worked on the Protégé ontology editor at Stanford, co-wrote 'Ontology Development 101', and co-wrote the 2019 paper introducing Google Dataset Search.

Software engineer at Creative Commons who co-wrote ccREL (2008).

Machine-learning researcher, co-author of the TransE paper (2013).

Developer at the National Library of Sweden, listed as an author of JSON-LD 1.0.

American markup-language specialist at Sun Microsystems who co-edited Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One (2004).

Machine-learning researcher at Google, co-author of the TransE paper (2013).

Computer scientist who built the Linked Movie Database at the University of Toronto, presented in 2009.

Semantic Web researcher who co-authored the RDF-star report and co-edits RDF 1.2.

Finnish computer scientist who co-edited the first RDF specification (1999) and co-wrote the 2001 Scientific American article 'The Semantic Web'.

Researcher, then at Massachusetts General Hospital, co-editor of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model.

Co-editor of the PROV data model (2013).

Nokia researcher who co-authored the Named Graphs paper (2005).

Software engineer and Bluesky's CTO; co-author of the 2024 paper describing Bluesky and AT Protocol.

Computer scientist who co-wrote the 2010 paper defining nanopublications and co-chaired the W3C Provenance Working Group, which produced PROV, while at VU University Amsterdam.

Co-author of the PICS 1.1 label specification (1996).

Computer scientist who co-wrote Ontology Matching (2007) with Jérôme Euzenat.

University of Surrey researcher and editor of the Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices.

Researcher at Bell Labs who co-edited OWL's formal semantics and co-wrote the design history of OWL.

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

W3C's vice-president for technical strategy, who wrote the 2026 paper 'W3C and the State of the Web in the AI Era'.

Computer scientist, co-author of 'SPARQL Web-Querying Infrastructure: Ready for Action?' (2013).

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

W3C staff member who co-edited the 1999 RDF Model and Syntax Specification with Ora Lassila.

Information scientist at Monegraph who co-edited the W3C ODRL Information Model 2.2 (2018).

Linked Data researcher who co-founded DBpedia and maintained the Linked Open Data cloud diagram.

Researcher who proposed ontologies for orbital debris and space situational awareness data from 2015.

Digital cultural heritage specialist, then at the Getty, now at Yale; lead editor of the W3C Web Annotation Data Model.

Music-informatics researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-author of the Music Ontology and its Event Ontology.

American software engineer at Google, co-author of MapReduce.

Co-editor of PROV-O (2013).

University of Manchester researcher and co-editor of the SKOS Reference (2009).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON, and an associate editor of the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places.

One of the University of Maryland developers of SHOE, an early ontology language for the Web (around 1996).

Siemens engineer and editor of the W3C Web of Things Thing Description (2020).

Computer scientist at Google, co-author of 'From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration' (2016).

Researcher at INRIA who co-edited the W3C ODRL Information Model 2.2 (2018).

Co-editor of the 2008 RDFa specification.

Stanford researcher and lead author of the SPINACH paper (2024) on language models writing SPARQL for Wikidata.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

CSIRO scientist who edited the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (2017) and GeoSPARQL 1.1 (2024).

Stanford researcher and co-author of the SPINACH paper (2024).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON.

Co-editor of the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language (2013).

Computer scientist and co-author, with R.V. Guha and Dan Brickley, of the 2016 history of schema.org.

IBM engineer and editor of the W3C Linked Data Platform 1.0 (2015).

Co-editor of the 2008 RDFa specification, written at CWI.

OCLC researcher whose work with Eric Miller led to the 1995 workshop in Dublin, Ohio, that created Dublin Core.

US Air Force veteran who has run CelesTrak since 1985, first as a bulletin board in his spare time, republishing the US satellite catalogue and orbital elements for the public.

Fujitsu Laboratories of America engineer and editor of the W3C Web of Things Thing Description (2020).

Web standards developer who co-founded the microformats effort and the IndieWeb community, and has worked at Microsoft and Mozilla.

OpenLink Software staff member who co-edited Verifiable Credential Data Integrity 1.0 (2025).

French computer scientist, lead author of 'From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration' (2016).

Computer scientist at Google, co-author of 'From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration' (2016).

Co-author of the PICS 1.1 label specification (1996).

Co-author of RFC 7946 (2016), the IETF standard for GeoJSON.

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

Researcher in geospatial semantics at Mainz University of Applied Sciences, editor of GeoSPARQL 1.1 and of the later Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices.

Co-editor of PROV-O (2013).

Managing editor of Pleiades, the gazetteer of ancient places, at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

Researcher who co-wrote 'Linked Data – The Story So Far' (2009) with Christian Bizer and Tim Berners-Lee.

Czech computer scientist who led the word2vec work at Google.

Latvian computer scientist, co-editor of the SIOC specification at DERI Galway.

Siemens researcher and editor of the W3C Web of Things Thing Description (2020).

Austrian legal scholar at Oxford who argued in 'Delete' (2009) for the virtue of forgetting.

Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, who produced the Decentralized Web Summits of 2016 and 2018 and DWeb Camp, and helps steward the DWeb community.

Developer at Digital Bazaar and co-editor of CBOR-LD 1.0.

Co-author of the PICS 1.1 label specification (1996).

Computer scientist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and lead author of sameAs.cc (2018), the largest published collection of owl:sameAs links.

Chinese-American computer scientist who led Google's Knowledge Vault and later Amazon's product knowledge graph.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

Computer security researcher, first author of the 2015 paper that named machine unlearning.

Co-author of 'Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap' (2023).

Co-author of 'Industry-scale Knowledge Graphs: Lessons and Challenges' (2019).

Researcher who co-designed the Music Ontology at Queen Mary, University of London, then built linked data for BBC programmes and music.