Web standards

Global name for any resource, from a web page to a person or an idea; the foundation the rest of the stack builds on. IRIs extend URIs to Unicode.

Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Web whose data carries machine-readable meaning, built on standards such as RDF and OWL.

Tim Berners-Lee's diagram of the Semantic Web as layers, first shown in his XML 2000 keynote in December 2000: Unicode and URIs at the base, then XML, RDF and RDF Schema, an ontology vocabulary, logic, proof and trust, with digital signatures alongside. W3C redrew it as standards arrived, adding query and rules.

Long-running W3C Technical Architecture Group issue over whether an HTTP URI names a web page or the thing the page describes, such as a person.

Set of triples given its own URI, so that statements can be made about the set, which is how provenance and context are recorded; stored as quads.

Way of publishing data on the Web with URIs, HTTP and RDF, so that data sets link to one another the way documents do.

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'.

Smallest unit of publishable scientific information: a single assertion written as RDF named graphs, bundled with its provenance and publication details so it can be cited and credited on its own.

URI that can be looked up over HTTP to get data about the thing it names, which in turn links to further URIs: 'follow your nose'.

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

The problem of recognising when different names refer to the same thing. OWL's owl:sameAs states it, but used loosely across datasets it merges things that are only similar.

The subject–predicate–object statement that is the basic unit of RDF.

Program that acts on a person's behalf, for example finding and booking a service; the payoff promised by the 2001 Scientific American article.

Database built to store RDF triples and answer SPARQL queries; Virtuoso is one example.

Tim Berners-Lee's proposal to CERN management for a linked information system. It became the World Wide Web.

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

Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 note arguing that a URI, once published, should keep working indefinitely, and that breaking links is a choice made by poor design rather than an accident of technology.

Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 Design Issues note giving a high-level plan for the architecture of the Semantic Web.

Tim Berners-Lee's account of how he created the World Wide Web, ending with his plans for a Semantic Web.

Roy Fielding's 2000 doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine, which defined REST, the architectural style of the Web: resources named by URIs, manipulated through representations over a uniform interface. Most Web APIs since claim descent from it.

WWW10 paper of May 2001 by José Kahan, Marja-Riitta Koivunen, Eric Prud'hommeaux and Ralph Swick describing Annotea.

Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila describing software agents that act on machine-readable meaning published on the Web.

Design history of OWL by Horrocks, Patel-Schneider and van Harmelen, tracing it from description logics and RDF.

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.

WWW 2005 paper extending RDF so that a set of statements can be named by a URI and described like any resource. It shows publishers signing their graphs and consumers deciding which graphs to trust.

Roy Fielding's June 2005 message announcing the W3C TAG's answer to httpRange-14: a URI that answers with a 2xx response names an information resource, while one that answers with a 303 redirect may name anything.

2006 conference paper by Krötzsch, Vrandečić and Völkel introducing Semantic MediaWiki.

IEEE Intelligent Systems article in which Shadbolt, Hall and Berners-Lee reassessed the Semantic Web five years after the 2001 article.

Tim Berners-Lee's short Design Issues note setting out four rules for publishing data on the Web with URIs and links.

2007 paper by the DBpedia founders describing how they extracted Wikipedia's structured content and published it as Linked Data.

Jim Hendler's 2007 editorial in IEEE Intelligent Systems, six years after he co-wrote the Scientific American article that promised Semantic Web agents, asking why those agents had not appeared.

2007 paper by Yves Raimond, Samer Abdallah, Mark Sandler and Frédérick Giasson at ISMIR presenting the Music Ontology, a framework for editorial, cultural and acoustic information about music on the Semantic Web.

2008 EKAW paper by Martin Hepp presenting GoodRelations, an ontology for describing what businesses offer, at what price and on what terms.

W3C Interest Group Note (2008) giving publishers two recipes for URIs that name things rather than pages: hash URIs, and 303 redirects based on the httpRange-14 resolution.

2008 paper by Pat Hayes and Harry Halpin arguing that reference is ambiguous in any language, so Web architecture cannot make what a URI names fully unambiguous, and that a redirect alone does not settle it.

Practitioner's guide by Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler to modelling with RDFS and OWL.

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.

Survey by Bizer, Heath and Berners-Lee of the principles and early growth of the Web of Linked Data.

2009 ESWC paper by Georgi Kobilarov, Tom Scott, Yves Raimond and colleagues at the BBC and Freie Universität Berlin, describing how BBC Programmes and BBC Music used DBpedia and MusicBrainz identifiers to connect content across the BBC's site.

Paper by Pérez, Arenas and Gutiérrez giving SPARQL a compositional formal semantics and proving the complexity of evaluating it; general SPARQL patterns are PSPACE-complete.

ISWC 2009 paper by Hartig, Bizer and Freytag proposing link-traversal querying: a SPARQL query is answered by following links and looking up URIs as it runs, so the data sources need not be known in advance.

2010 paper by Paul Groth, Andrew Gibson and Jan Velterop in Information Services & Use defining the nanopublication.

2010 ISWC paper showing that owl:sameAs links between Linked Data sets are often used to mean 'similar' or 'related' rather than strict identity, and proposing finer-grained alternatives.

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.

Book by Tom Heath and Christian Bizer setting out the Linked Data principles and how to publish and use Linked Data.

Jonathan Rees's February 2012 call, for the W3C TAG, for proposals to change or withdraw the 2005 resolution, citing the cost of 303 redirects: extra round trips, caching, and hosts that cannot send them.

Report of a W3C workshop held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in September 2013. Participants found no standard for checking RDF data against constraints, and a majority backed a working group to define one.

Aaron Swartz's unfinished short book on Semantic Web ideas, published after his death in 2013.

ISWC 2013 paper that monitored hundreds of public SPARQL endpoints and found many of them often unavailable, slow, or limited in what they would answer: evidence that free public query services were hard to keep running.

Manu Sporny's January 2014 blog post, written days after JSON-LD became a W3C Recommendation, saying that better Web APIs, not the Semantic Web, motivated JSON-LD, and that keeping RDF out of sight was what made it usable.

SEMANTiCS 2014 paper introducing Shape Expressions (ShEx), a structural schema language that describes the shape RDF data should have and checks data against it.

Communications of the ACM article by Vrandečić and Krötzsch introducing Wikidata's design and goals.

2016 Journal of Web Semantics paper proposing Triple Pattern Fragments: servers answer only simple triple patterns and clients do the rest of the query, trading some speed for servers that are cheap to run and stay up.

Semantic Web journal paper describing LOV, a curated catalogue of reusable vocabularies that records how they link to each other, their versions and who maintains them, to help publishers choose existing vocabularies instead of inventing new ones.

Olaf Hartig's 2017 paper proposing to nest RDF triples, so a statement can carry metadata such as a source or a certainty score without standard reification's bloat. It led to RDF-star and to triple terms in RDF 1.2.

2018 ESWC paper that collected about 559 million owl:sameAs statements from a 2015 crawl of Linked Data, computed which names they make equivalent, and published the result with an error score for each link.

David Booth's November 2018 message to the W3C semantic-web list arguing that the whole RDF ecosystem, from SPARQL and OWL to tools, is too hard for average developers, the middle third by ability, and that education had not fixed it in fifteen years; it began the EasierRDF effort on GitHub.

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.

Survey by Aidan Hogan and 17 co-authors of the data models, query languages, reasoning and methods behind knowledge graphs.

2024 paper by Liu, Semnani, Triedman, Xu, Zhao and Lam with a dataset of real questions from Wikidata's 'Request a Query' forum, where users ask others to write SPARQL for them, and a language-model agent that writes such queries the way an expert would.

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.

October 2026 paper by the W3C Strategy Team, prepared by Philippe Le Hégaret, on how the Web's standards must change as AI agents act for users: agents prefer text and structured data to HTML, JSON-LD, RDF, DCAT and ODRL become more valuable as inputs and guardrails for agents, and Verifiable Credentials and DIDs can identify agents and whom they act for.

HyperText Markup Language, the markup of Web pages, whose anchor element carries the Web's links. Berners-Lee first described it in the informal 'HTML Tags' document in late 1991; HTML 2.0 was published as RFC 1866 in November 1995.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol: the Web's request–response protocol for fetching a resource by its URL. Berners-Lee's first version was written up in 1991; HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 followed as IETF RFCs. Looking up a URI to get data about the thing it names depends on it.

Persistent Uniform Resource Locator: a web address that points at a resolver instead of the resource, so the target can move without breaking links. OCLC introduced it in 1995 and ran purl.org, where Dublin Core and many other vocabularies keep their namespaces, until it handed the service to the Internet Archive in September 2016.

Small set of metadata elements, such as title, creator and date, for describing resources on the Web; it began at a 1995 workshop in Dublin, Ohio.

Simple HTML Ontology Extensions: an early language for writing ontologies and annotating web pages with machine-readable claims, developed at the University of Maryland around 1996; among the first ontology languages made for the Web.

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.

W3C markup language for structured documents and data, a Recommendation since February 1998; RDF's first official syntax was written in it.

Data model that describes resources as subject–predicate–object statements identified by URIs. It became a W3C Recommendation in 1999 and was revised as RDF 1.1 in 2014.

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.

RDF vocabulary for describing people, their online accounts and who they know; one of the first widely used Semantic Web vocabularies.

Ontology language formed in 2001 by merging the American DAML with the European OIL; a thin layer over RDF Schema with description-logic semantics, and the direct basis of OWL.

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.

Microformat from 2003 for marking up how the person behind a link relates to you, such as friend, colleague or met, using the rel attribute; Google's Social Graph API crawled it.

Small RDF vocabulary from January 2003 for points with latitude, longitude and altitude, made in the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group; never a W3C standard, it became the most used way to give a thing a position in RDF.

W3C language for writing ontologies on the Web, based on description logics. OWL 2 followed in 2009.

W3C vocabulary for describing classes and properties of RDF data; the first schema language for RDF.

W3C Technical Architecture Group's account of the Web's architecture: identifying resources by URI, interacting with them through representations, and data formats; a W3C Recommendation since 15 December 2004.

Conventions for marking up people, events, reviews and similar data with plain HTML class names, without a separate data format.

RDF vocabulary for music, first released in 2007, describing artists, works, recordings and releases, and the performances and recordings that connect them as events in time. It reuses FRBR's split between a work and its expressions, and FOAF for people.

GS1 standard, first ratified in April 2007, for sharing events in a product's journey through supply chains: what was seen, when, where and why. Version 2.0 (June 2022) added JSON-LD, a REST API and GS1 Digital Link URIs.

RDF vocabulary for describing posts, threads, forums and their authors, so that conversations on blogs, forums and mailing lists can be linked across sites; a W3C Member Submission of June 2007.

Martin Hepp's web vocabulary for products, prices and offers, adopted by Google, Yahoo, Bing and retailers such as Best Buy, and merged into schema.org in November 2012 as its commerce vocabulary.

Query language for RDF data, a W3C Recommendation since January 2008; SPARQL 1.1 followed in 2013.

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.

W3C syntax for embedding RDF statements in HTML attributes, first a Recommendation in October 2008.

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.

W3C vocabulary for publishing thesauri, classification schemes and subject headings as Linked Data; a Recommendation since August 2009.

Second version of OWL, adding profiles such as OWL 2 EL, QL and RL for tractable reasoning; a W3C Recommendation since October 2009.

OGC standard, version 1.0 from 2012 and 1.1 from January 2024, that adds a vocabulary for geometries to RDF and spatial functions and relations to SPARQL, so queries can ask what is within, near or touching what.

Shared web APIs for digitised images, proposed in late 2011 by research libraries including the British Library, Stanford, the Bodleian and the BnF. Its Image API (2012) serves zoomable images, and its Presentation API (2013) describes books and artworks as JSON-LD manifests, so any viewer can show any library's images.

Identifiers and an ontology for national and EU legislation, so each law and version has a stable web address and machine-readable metadata; the EU Council invited its adoption in October 2012.

Second version of SPARQL, adding updates, aggregates, subqueries and federated queries; a W3C Recommendation since March 2013.

W3C family of specifications for recording provenance: who made something, from what, and how. PROV-DM is the model, PROV-O its OWL ontology; both 2013.

IETF binary data format with a data model close to JSON's, designed for small code and message size on constrained devices; first published as RFC 7049 in October 2013 and revised as Internet Standard RFC 8949 in December 2020.

W3C vocabulary for describing datasets in data catalogues, used by government open-data portals; a Recommendation since January 2014.

JSON-based syntax for Linked Data that lets ordinary JSON be read as RDF; a W3C Recommendation since January 2014.

Compact text syntax for writing RDF triples by hand, widely used long before it became a W3C Recommendation in February 2014.

Small OWL ontology for smart appliances and the Internet of Things, begun in 2014–15 in a study for the European Commission and continued by ETSI, with extensions for energy, buildings, agriculture and other sectors.

W3C Recommendation of 26 February 2015 setting rules for reading and writing Linked Data with ordinary HTTP operations, so resources and containers behave like a familiar REST API; Solid builds on it.

Community profile of the CIDOC CRM for describing artworks and other heritage objects, in JSON-LD and using the Getty Vocabularies, so that museum data is practical for developers; started in 2016.

W3C Recommendation (2017) for telling any URL that you have linked to it. The receiving site checks that the link really exists and can then show it, giving the Web's one-way links a way back.

W3C Recommendation of February 2017 for describing annotations, such as comments, highlights and tags, in JSON-LD so they can be shared between tools; IIIF uses it for annotations on images.

W3C vocabulary and JSON-LD format for describing social activities such as posts, likes and follows; a Recommendation since May 2017.

W3C language for validating RDF data against shapes, closer to schema checking than to OWL's open-world reasoning; a Recommendation since July 2017.

Joint W3C and OGC guidance, first published in 2017, for putting spatial data on the Web rather than in downloads; its first practice is to give places and spatial things persistent HTTP URIs.

Joint W3C and OGC ontology, a Recommendation of 19 October 2017, for describing sensors, actuators, observations and samples, with the lightweight SOSA core for simple use; a 2023 edition has been in draft since September 2025.

W3C Recommendation (2018) for decentralised social networking, used by Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. Its messages are Activity Streams 2.0 in JSON-LD, so the Fediverse runs on Linked Data.

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.

GS1 standard for writing product identifiers such as GTINs as web URIs, so that a barcode or QR code on a pack resolves to information about the product; ratified in August 2018. It puts Linked Data identifiers on everyday goods.

W3C data model for tamper-evident digital credentials, such as diplomas or licences, that can be checked cryptographically. Version 1.0 became a Recommendation in November 2019, and version 2.0, with its Data Integrity and cryptosuite specifications, in May 2025.

W3C Recommendation of 9 April 2020 that describes a device's properties, actions and events in JSON that can be read as JSON-LD, so applications can work across Internet of Things platforms.

W3C specification for identifiers that their subject can create and control without a central registry. DID 1.0 became a Recommendation in July 2022; DID 1.1 reached Candidate Recommendation in March 2026.

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.

W3C algorithm that gives any RDF dataset a single canonical form, so the same graph always hashes and signs the same way regardless of blank-node labels or order; a Recommendation since May 2024.

Revision of SHACL by the W3C Data Shapes Working Group, in drafts since March 2025, adding modules for node expressions, rules, user interfaces, profiling and, from September 2026, inference rules that derive new triples from existing ones.

W3C specification for attaching cryptographic proofs to data such as verifiable credentials, using pluggable cryptosuites; a Recommendation since May 2025.

W3C specification, a first public draft since March 2026, for giving applications secure, permissioned access to data people store elsewhere, in an interoperable way.

Revision of RDF that adds triple terms, so a statement can itself be the object of another statement; it grew out of RDF-star. Its core spec became a W3C Candidate Recommendation in April 2026.

Binary serialization of JSON-LD in CBOR that uses JSON-LD contexts to compress terms and values, reporting results more than 60% better than general-purpose compression; meant for storage- and bandwidth-constrained settings. A W3C JSON-LD Working Group First Public Working Draft since 28 April 2026.

Europeana's RDF model for cultural heritage metadata. It reuses Dublin Core, SKOS and OAI-ORE so that each provider's own description is kept alongside Europeana's additions; it replaced the flat Europeana Semantic Elements.

Hypertext system of documents linked by URLs and served over HTTP, built by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN from 1990.

OpenLink Software's database server for SQL and RDF data, used to publish DBpedia and many other Linked Data sets.

DARPA research programme started in 1999 by Jim Hendler to create machine-readable representations for the Web; its RDF-based DAML language fed directly into OWL.

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.

W3C project of 2001 for shared web annotations: remarks are stored as RDF on separate annotation servers and shown over the page without changing it.

Annual research conference of the Semantic Web community, held since 2002 after a 2001 symposium at Stanford.

Database of more than 25 million place names, founded in 2005 and published under a Creative Commons attribution licence. Each place has a stable URI that returns a web page or RDF, with links to Wikipedia, which made it the usual place identifier in linked data.

Extension to MediaWiki that lets wiki pages carry typed, queryable data annotations.

Project that extracts structured data from Wikipedia infoboxes and publishes it as Linked Data; an early hub of the Linked Open Data cloud.

Diagram of datasets published as Linked Data and the links between them, first drawn in 2007 with DBpedia at its centre.

The BBC's pages for every programme (from 2007) and every artist (beta from July 2008), each a web page and an RDF description. Artists were keyed on MusicBrainz identifiers and linked to DBpedia, so a public broadcaster built on fan-made data.

European Union portal to the digitised collections of thousands of cultural heritage institutions, launched in November 2008; it aggregates their metadata with the Europeana Data Model and publishes it as Linked Open Data.

Linked open data about films, built at the University of Toronto and presented in April 2009, with links from its films to DBpedia and other datasets.

The New York Times's release of its subject headings as linked open data, beginning with about 5,000 people's names on 30 October 2009, mapped by hand to DBpedia and Freebase.

Linked data wrapper for TV Tropes, announced in December 2009, that turns the wiki's pages into RDF linking works of fiction to the tropes they use; by November 2010 about 6,000 of its 16,000 items were linked to DBpedia, and users could correct the extraction.

UK government open data portal, built under Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt and publicly launched in January 2010.

The UK's official online statute book, run by The National Archives and launched in 2010, which publishes every law as a web page and as data, with each page's data a URI suffix away, and exposes the statute book as linked data.

Project that extracts microdata, RDFa, JSON-LD and microformats data from the Common Crawl web corpus and publishes it for research.

Free, collaboratively edited knowledge graph run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It supplies structured data to Wikipedia and the sameAs links on this site.

Permanent URL redirect service run by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group since 2013. Anyone can claim a path by pull request and point it wherever their data lives; a consortium of organisations has pledged to keep it running.

Broader W3C programme on data on the Web that took over the Semantic Web Activity's groups in December 2013.

Tim Berners-Lee's project for storing personal data in user-controlled 'pods' that apps read and write through Linked Data standards.

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

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

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

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

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

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 that hosts Wikipedia, Wikidata and the other Wikimedia projects.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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).

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

Co-editor of the SKOS Reference (2009).

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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.

Co-editor of RDF Dataset Canonicalization (2024).

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

Developer listed as an author of ActivityPub.

Co-editor of DCAT (2014).

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

Co-editor of the Turtle Recommendation (2014).

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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).

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

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.

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

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).

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.

Co-editor of DCAT (2014).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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

Co-editor of the 2008 RDFa specification.

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.

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

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

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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).

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.

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

Co-editor of PROV-O (2013).

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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).

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

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).

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.

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