Search

Machine-readable data inside ordinary HTML pages, written as microformats, RDFa, microdata or JSON-LD and usually using the schema.org vocabulary.

Plain JSON over HTTP with each API defining its own fields, without shared vocabularies or global identifiers; the everyday alternative most developers chose over Linked Data.

Graph of entities and the relations between them, used to integrate and query data; the term spread after Google's 2012 Knowledge Graph.

1997 submission to the W3C by R.V. Guha and Tim Bray describing MCF in XML; a direct precursor to RDF.

Brin and Page's 1998 paper describing Google and PageRank, which ranks pages by the links pointing to them; it showed that the Web's link structure could serve as a signal of authority, with no metadata needed from publishers.

Cory Doctorow's essay arguing that reliable metadata is unattainable because people lie, are lazy and disagree.

Clay Shirky's essay arguing that the Semantic Web's reliance on syllogistic logic fails on real-world, context-dependent data.

2004 OSDI paper by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat describing how Google split computations over huge datasets across thousands of ordinary machines; it set the pattern for big data processing.

2008 paper describing Freebase's data model and how its contributors built it.

Halevy, Norvig and Pereira's 2009 essay arguing that simple models trained on very large amounts of web data beat elaborate hand-built models, and that meaning is better learned from use at scale than specified in advance.

Google blog post by Amit Singhal announcing the Knowledge Graph, which brought the term into wide use.

2014 KDD paper by Xin Luna Dong and eight Google colleagues describing a knowledge base built by machine: facts extracted from text, tables and page structure across the Web, combined with existing knowledge bases and given probabilities of being true.

Communications of the ACM article by Guha, Brickley and Macbeth on the history and design of schema.org.

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.

2018 paper by Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova: a transformer pre-trained on large amounts of text that set new results on many language tasks; Google applied it to Search in 2019.

2019 paper by Brickley, Burgess and Noy describing how Google Dataset Search finds datasets through their schema.org descriptions.

2019 Communications of the ACM article by engineers from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, eBay and IBM comparing how their companies build and run knowledge graphs, and what remains hard.

Format for describing the structure and metadata of websites, developed by R.V. Guha at Apple and later submitted to the W3C with Tim Bray as an XML application.

Family of XML formats for syndicating site updates. Netscape's RSS 0.90 (1999) and RSS 1.0 were RDF-based; RSS 2.0 is plain XML.

Shared vocabulary for structured data in web pages, launched in 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo, with Yandex joining later that year.

Query language for web APIs developed at Facebook from 2012 and published in 2015; it lets a client ask for exactly the JSON it needs, and became the common choice where Linked Data APIs were not adopted.

GS1's terms for products, organisations and locations published as Linked Data and designed as an extension to schema.org.

Collaboratively edited knowledge graph built by Metaweb and bought by Google in 2010. It fed Google's Knowledge Graph, and its data was offered to Wikidata when it closed in 2016.

Google service launched in February 2008 that crawled XFN, FOAF and other public markup to report who links to whom across the Web; retired in April 2012 for lack of use.

Google search feature announced in May 2009 that shows ratings, prices and other details in results, read from microformats and RDFa in pages.

Google's knowledge base of entities and their relations, launched in 2012 and built partly from Freebase.

Search engine for datasets that indexes schema.org Dataset descriptions published on 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

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

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

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.

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

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

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

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

Co-author of the 2008 paper describing Freebase.

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