Central, common resource for core vocabularies?

I've been lurking for a short while, but not actively contributing, so
apologies first if this has been said before, is completely wrong,
off-topic, or just impossible...

I've developed quite a few metadata/RDF enabled sites for clients over
the last couple of years; each client has their own RDF schema with
their own vocabularies.  To me, this isn't really creating a 'semantic
web', but small semantic 'fragments' which are, for most purposes, not
easily shared/combined.

I was wondering what the possibilities were for a central RDF/OWL
resource that contained a core set of vocabularies - e.g. dictionary
words, proper nouns, etc., with then (possibly) additional OWL
statements for mapping thesauri between words?

What I am imagining has many limitations (and has probably been
suggested before), but would sort-of fulfil a 'Dublin Core' type
simplicity for the most common terms/words.  For example, an RDF
statement for the DC 'subject' property could contain references to
http://www.rdfwords.org/dict/s/shark and
http://www.rdfwords.org/dict/m/movie and
http://www.rdfwords.org/dict/h/horror.  In practice, the actual URLs
would (via mod_rewrite, etc.) draw the definitions from a database and
create the RDF schema dynamically (just for ease of
administration/importing).  The thesauri would then equate similar
words, such as movie and film, and map broad and narrow hierarchies for
the terms.  Fragment identifiers could be used to identify specific
meanings of a particular word, e.g.
http://www.rdfwords.org/dict/s/set#def4

It would be a mammoth task to create, administer, and raise awareness,
but with a DMOZ distributed type approach to the management/editorial
process, progress could be made, I think.

Is this at all feasible?  Has it been seriously attempted before?

Any thoughts/insults gratefully received...

--------------------------------------
Dan Zambonini
Box UK
Internet Development and Consultancy

e: dan.zambonini@boxuk.com
w: www.boxuk.com
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Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2003 09:26:00 UTC