In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
[VORLESUNG: ...just for info, not mandatory]
Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, and Frank van Harmelen. From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language. J. of Web Semantics, 1(1):7-26, 2003.