In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a Semantic Web," a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually.

One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe,...