One of the interesting debates from the Semantic Web meetup this month, which has stuck in my head ever since, is the argument over whether it’s worth it to try to compile a master, global, schema–ontology–vocabulary–whatever you want to call it.
I could tell that the academic side of the crowd was again’ it, but the business side of the crowd was ‘fer it.
Guess which side will win?
The analogy that was given (sorry don’t remember who said it) was that a pig farmer might use a different concept of "a time" than I might. So 3PM Pig-Farming Time might equal 2PM Jason Time. (If I got the analogy wrong I’m sure I’ll be corrected, but it was something like that.) Or, one that kept coming up as a real-world example was that a transaction has totally different meanings across industries.
I think that thinking along those lines is misguided. You can’t define everything in the world, but you can 
sure define a lot of it. That’s what businesses end up spending a lot of their time doing–defining their world. I am intimately familiar with this, as it is one of the biggest problems that we struggled with at Latigent (now Cisco). Company A will define "revenue" as one thing, Company B will define it as something else.
This isn’t an either/or proposition.
You can give them both definitions, they really don’t care.. This is an instance where you really can have your cake and eat it too. As long as both values are populated, they will take the one they need.
To me, this is one of the huge value-adds of the Semantic Web. You can go out and see if somebody has already developed a schema for what you’re trying to build, and if they have you don’t have to write it yourself. And your app will automatically inter-operate with theirs, in some areas. It’s really cool.
Every company out there should really be using available schemas as much as possible–get into the Semantic Web game early and often. All you have to do is start adopting a standard schema, taking as much as possible from what’s already publicly available.
Why NOT build a giant global schema? Isn’t that what the ontology-building stuff is all about anyway? It’s not like it all has to be from the same place. If I come up with the best definition of a "location", because mine includes height above sea level and active quantum dimension, you’re free to use that in your application for "location" and develop some new schema pieces for the custom stuff you’re building. Eventually the global schema will just kind of materialize out of the best (well, technically probably the most POPULAR) pieces of publicly-available schema out there anyway.
Heh, boy I can’t even imagine what this is going to do to the business intelligence space eventually. Totally demolish and rebuild it, is my guess.
