ALT I examine a dispute over RDFa, a proposed extension to the HTML standard intended to ease the authoring and publishing of linked data by allowing it to be embedded in Web pages. I begin by summarizing the theoretical motivation for examining disputes in order to find clues about the moral frameworks informing technical practice. Next I provide historical context for the dispute, specifically the transfer of control over the HTML standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to a consortium of companies developing Web browsers—a conjuncture that significantly shaped the subsequent development of the Web and the rise of the platforms that consume it. After describing the traces left by the dispute in public mailing list archives and how I analyzed them, I present the results of that analysis, showing that distinct and incompatible visions of the common good—not disagreement over technical issues—underlay the dispute.

ALT Conceptual modeling is a broad practice encompassing knowledge organization, domain modeling, and knowledge representation. It is best understood not as a scientific process of discovery, but as a constructive process of language design. This constructive process involves both explicating differences of meaning implicit in some discursive tradition and revising those differences to improve that tradition. Understood this way, conceptual modeling can serve as the basis for a paradigm of information research and practice that does not reproduce fundamental asymmetries between researchers and the people they study, or between practitioners and the people they serve. Progress within this paradigm will involve combining methods from what have up to now been different traditions or modes of conceptual modeling. It will require paying closer attention to the historical and structural dimensions of discursive traditions and reimagining the function of critique.