The popularity and press surrounding the release of XML has created widespread interest in standards within particular communities that focus on representing content. The dream is that these standards will enable consumers and B2B systems to more accurately search information on the Web within these communities. We believe the expansiveness and diversity of the Web creates a need for a small set of standard semantic primitives that have the same meaning and interpretation across communities. Such a standard set of primitives should take into account existing efforts in ontology, and in e-commerce content standards. We are investigating existing content standards proposals for the Web, and present here a large, but by no means complete, list of these standards efforts classified by their ontological sophistication and their intent. We then propose some very preliminary notions of how these standards could be harmonized to produce a set of standard semantic primitives for describing content.
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