Ora Lassila is a Finnish computer scientist who lives in the United States and works as an Associate Director of Data Engineering and Governance at Accenture. He has been conducting research into the Semantic Web since 1996, and was a co-author, alongside Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler, of the 2001 Scientific American article "The Semantic Web", which is now the most cited paper in the Semantic Web field.^[1] His works also include the 2007 publication "Programming Semantic Web Applications: A Synthesis of Knowledge Representation and Semi-Structured Data".

His early work in the field included proposing the original Resource Description Framework (RDF) Specification with Ralph R. Swick. He served as an elected member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Advisory Board from 1998 to 2013 and was a member of the steering committee of the Semantic Web Science Association. From 1996 to 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science working with the W3C, and he has also held positions at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, as a Research Scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology, as a research fellow at the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a Principal Technologist at Amazon Web Services.

Lassila's work includes a frame-based Knowledge Representation system dubbed "SCAM", which he developed first at Helsinki University of Technology and later at Carnegie Mellon University, and which flew on board the NASA Deep Space 1 probe that passed the asteroid belt in 1999. The system served as the Knowledge Representation substrate for an on-board planner used in an experiment to enable the probe to perform its functions autonomously. In 1989, Lassila won the Best of Show at the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

External links include the original Resource Description Framework specifications, RDF Model and Syntax (1999 Recommendation), as well as the W3C Advisory Board and the Semantic Web Steering Committee. Additional links include Nokia Research Center and "Antics with Semantics: The Innovation Interview with Semantics Pioneer, Ora Lassila".