Matters

Order from Chaos - Natalya Noy on the issues of ontology reuse: "...Both of these trends are reflected in the vision of the Semantic Web, a form of Web content that will be processed by machines with ontologies as its backbone. Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila described the “grand vision” for the Semantic Web in a Scientific American article in 2001:1 Ordinary Web users instruct their personal agents to talk to one another, as well as to a number of other integrated online agents—for example, to find doctors that are covered by their insurance; to schedule their doctor appointments to satisfy both constraints from the doctor’s office and their own personal calendars; to request prescription refills, ensuring no harmful drug interactions; and so on. For this scenario to be possible, the agents need to share not only the terms—such as appointment, prescription, time of the day, and insurance—but also the meaning of these terms. For example, they need to understand that the time constraints are all in the same time zone (or to translate between time zones), to know that the term plans accepted in the knowledge base of one doctor’s agent means the same as health insurance for the patient’s agent (and not insurance, which refers to car insurance), and to realize it is related to the term do not accept for another doctor, which contains a list of excluded plans..."

"...Reusing ontologies is hard, just as reusing software code is. The Semantic Web makes it likely that people will reuse (portions of) ontologies incorrectly or inconsistently. Semantic interoperability, however, will be facilitated only to the extent that people reference and reuse public ontologies in ways that are consistent with their original intended use..."

And how is "their original intended use" established?

"...To reuse an ontology, one needs to find something to reuse. Users must be able to search through available ontologies to determine which ones, if any, are suitable for their particular tasks..."

And also determine which ones are known and used by the unknown agent(s) you may end up interacting with.