W3C

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

-- Oscar Wilde

The standards body that creates all those standards and documents. In particular the W3C is the body that is writing Semantic Web standards and specifications such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

W3C Bureaucracy

The W3C solution to problems (and non-problems) seems to be to form a comittee that forms a working group that engages in a long debate and produces a 100-page document. Or in the words of Aaron Swartz:

Instead of the “let’s just build something that works” attitude that made the Web (and the Internet) such a roaring success, they brought the formalizing mindset of mathematicians and the institutional structures of academics and defense contractors. They formed committees to form working groups to write drafts of ontologies that carefully listed (in 100-page Word documents) all possible things in the universe and the various properties they could have, and they spent hours in Talmudic debates over whether a washing machine was a kitchen appliance or a household cleaning device.