Are we better off with just one ontology on the Web?

Abstract

Ontologies have been used on the Web to enable semantic interoperability between parties that publish information independently of each other. They have also played an important role in the emergence of Linked Data. However, many ontologies on the Web do not see much use beyond their initial deployment and purpose in one dataset and therefore should rather be called what they are – (local) schemas, which per se do not provide any interoperable semantics. Only few ontologies are truly used as a shared conceptualization between different parties, mostly in controlled environments such as the BioPortal. In this paper, we discuss open challenges relating to true re-use of ontologies on the Web and raise the question: “are we better off with just one ontology on the Web?” Show more