I recently wrote a paper with Robert Neches who used to be my boss at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) . When I work with languages like OWL I'm often reminded of work we did at ISI using languages such as Loom and further work such as the Knowledge Sharing Initiative that I followed even though I was working in industry at that time. I thought an historical perspective on some of the research that resulted in Semantic Web standards such as OWL might be interesting.