The Semantic Web will be shaped by human choices, which implies that it will be political. To argue that point I suggest that schemas, one of the Semantic Web's building blocks, will be political in at least two senses. A schema represents an understanding of a world-chunk. The schema may be formally or informally expressed, and the understanding it contains may be formal or informal. Making machine representations possible is the immediate goal of schema creation.
Schemas are thus always relative to the interests of a person, an institution, or both.
Kendall Grant Clark Schemas reflect particular interests Schemas are political, in the first sense, because they serve or reflect particular interests, thus tending to exclude the interests of others. Schemas may be political in another sense by formalizing an understanding of a world-chunk that's strongly or weakly contested. Democracy is an example of a Galliean essentially contested concept. Contestedness is of course a practical reality of rational deliberation, and schema-making is partly constituted of rational deliberation. Some world-chunks are or contain social, economic, or cultural practices, conventions, or resources the meanings of which are strongly or weakly contested.