In general, I think that the Semantic Web must use a decentralized
approach for the definition and adoption of conceptual elements, same
as the Web uses decentralized, fault-tolerant approaches as a
fundamental principle. So calling for standardization bodies to
maintain "authoritative" vocabularies will not work at Web Scale, IMO.
At least, standards bodies may be to slow to provide ontologies and
ontology updates (INCOTERMS, for instance, updates it's definition of
trade terms only once per decade)
A few related papers:
1. Possible Ontologies: How Reality Constrains the Development of
Relevant Ontologies, in: IEEE Internet Computing, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp.
90-96, Jan-Feb 2007
PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/IEEE-IC-PossibleOntologies-published.pdf
2. E-Business Vocabularies as a Moving Target: Quantifying the
Conceptual Dynamics in Domains, Proceedings of the 16th International
Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
(EKAW2008), September 29 - October 3, 2008 (forthcoming), Acitrezza,
Italy, Springer LNCS, Vol. 5268, pp. 388-403.
PDF: http://www.heppnetz.de/files/ConceptualDynamics-EKAW2008-CRC-final6.pdf
Best
Martin
