Traditions

The research or practice community an entry came from. An entry can belong to several.

Research fields

Academic disciplines in computing that supplied the ideas: how to link documents, represent knowledge, store data and learn from it.

• Hypertext 36 entries Linking documents for people to read and write, from the memex and Xanadu to the Web. from As We May Think (1945), Memex (1945), Project Xanadu (1960)
• Knowledge representation 99 entries AI research into encoding knowledge so that machines can reason with it: semantic networks, frames and description logics. from Semantic network (1956), Programs with Common Sense (1959), Semantic Information Processing (1968)
• Databases 47 entries Storing and querying structured data at scale: relational, graph and other database models and their query languages. from Canada Geographic Information System (1963), Relational model (1969), A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (1970)
• Machine learning 59 entries Learning from data instead of encoding knowledge by hand; since the 2020s, chiefly large neural language models. from WordNet (1985), The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data (2009), ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (2012)

Standards and industry

Those who ship the Web's shared infrastructure, by consensus in standards bodies or by market in web companies, and the social platforms whose users built much of its data.

• Web standards 304 entries Building the Web's shared standards through open specification work, chiefly at the W3C and the IETF. from Information Management: A Proposal (1989), World Wide Web (1990), HTML (1991)
• Search 63 entries Web companies that organize the Web's data for their products: search engines above all, and the developer platforms whose formats and APIs others adopt. from Meta Content Framework (1995), Meta Content Framework Using XML (1997), The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998)
• Social web 59 entries Turning people, their relationships and their conversations into data: from FOAF, blogs, tags and microformats to Facebook, Twitter and the fediverse. from RSS (1999), FOAF (2000), Annotea (2001)

Movements

Communities organised around a value, such as openness or autonomy, rather than a technique: the political and philosophical side of the field.

• Open knowledge 51 entries Movements for free licences and open access to culture, knowledge and government data: free culture, open access and open data. from CelesTrak (1985), Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), MusicBrainz (2000)
• Decentralized web 70 entries Moving data and identity away from central platforms, toward users and peer networks. from On Distributed Communications: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (1964), Pretty Good Privacy (1991), Web of trust (1992)

Domains

Fields outside computing that adopted the technology for their own records and shaped it in return.

• Libraries, archives and museums 73 entries Organizing recorded knowledge and cultural heritage for finding and study: library catalogues, classification schemes and controlled vocabularies from Dewey and Otlet onward, archival finding aids, museum documentation, and the text and image standards of the digital humanities. from Dewey Decimal Classification (1876), Universal Decimal Classification (1905), Colon Classification (1933)
• Life sciences 15 entries Biology and medicine, which built some of the largest ontologies and shared databases. from Protégé (1987), Gene Ontology (1998), UniProt (2002)
• Media 38 entries Broadcasters, publishers, studios and record labels, and the fans who catalogue their films, music, programmes and stories: from Usenet film lists that became IMDb to MusicBrainz, fan archives and the BBC's linked data. from IMDb (1990), CDDB (1993), MusicBrainz (2000)
• Geospatial 50 entries Saying where things are, on the ground and in orbit: geographic information systems, maps and gazetteers, and the catalogues that track every object circling the Earth. from Satellite Catalog Number (1957), UN Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space (1962), Canada Geographic Information System (1963)
• Commerce and supply chain 21 entries Identifying, describing and tracking goods as they are made, shipped and sold: barcodes and product numbers, electronic data interchange between businesses, RFID, and product data on the Web. from Barcode (1949), Universal Product Code (1973), Global Trade Item Number (1977)
• Government and law 46 entries Public administrations, legislatures, courts and regulators: open government data, identifiers and markup for laws and judgments, and the law that governs data itself, from database rights to privacy. from EuroVoc (1984), Database Directive (1996), XBRL (1998)
• Finance 9 entries Banks, markets and their regulators: identifiers for companies and securities, machine-readable financial reporting, and the industry's ontology of contracts, much of it built after the 2008 crisis. from International Securities Identification Number (1981), XBRL (1998), Legal Entity Identifier (2012)
• Industry and engineering 18 entries Manufacturing, energy and the Internet of Things: product models shared across factories, the electricity grid's common model, and vocabularies for sensors and devices. from STEP (1994), ISO 15926 (2003), SAREF (2015)

See also the map of issues × traditions: which communities answered which questions, and when.

Other facets: Design issues · Kinds of idea · published as SKOS in graph.jsonld