DISQUS

Phil - I think you're missing the point - think of it as one namespace for all those URIs vs. many namespaces -- that is, in one case we'd all have to agree that "http://ex.com/foo#fish" was a particular thing with particular properties and etc, vs. allowing different people to have different ideas about what "fish" are - by keeping the info at different URIs and linking them together. So someone can define a vocabulary with some set of properties, someone else who disagrees, can do another, concepts can be linked or not, etc. In the "We all agree to one thing and sing kumbaya" ontology view, we must get all sorts of people from different cultures and approaches and views and religions and and and to all agree to everything - seems pretty daunting, right? On the other hand, the Semantic Web (i.e. web of semantic concepts) let's many different ones coexist, one can extend another, they can disagree, they can be simple or complex as needed, and they, most important of all, because of the URIs can be linked into a global whole -- but that global whole is not going to be consistent, carefully organized, and agreed to by everyone - and that's the key point we're trying to make. Note that this is related, but somewhat different, than what Steve Reed said - the linking of common terms is a piece of it, but the ability to have local agreement and real differences, that's not traditional to the knowledge approach - and requires new technologies and approaches, which is where RDFS and OWL come in...

A lot of the Semantic Web vision is based on exactly what you are asking for - something like MetaWeb, but open and distributed - like the difference between a great ebook and the Web - each has its place, but the place for an open distributed store as a way of linking things seems to be important -- check out the W3C's Semantic Web Activity (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw)