Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes . In the first part of this two-part essay, I examine the ways in which the Semantic Web may be political by focusing on the ways in which schemas may be political. But first I need to lay out some background knowledge, describe how I construe some familiar terms, and how I define some other, perhaps unfamiliar, terms. Institutions and individuals create schemas in working groups of programmers, analysts, domain specialists and others. The schemas they create are usually formalized in a meta-languages like DTD or the W3C's XML Schema Definition Language.
Some schemas become de facto or de jure standards.
Schema making requires the skill and expertise of many expert practitioners and is costly. Schemas are often created by institutions whose sole purpose is financial profit. The number of public schemas increases daily. Schemas are being created that will structure exchange between people, between people and institutions, and between institutions, including all levels of government, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Let's assume for a moment that the Semantic Web is political.