There are many reasons that semantic technology are used selectively but a major one is that special training and tools are needed to specify semantics. Often the results of good work is not available for others to leverage and use with the tools available to people trying to leverage semantics. Open Ontology Repositories (OORs) are relatively new tools designed to make good semantics via ontologies more widely available. (2JXD)
Such repositories along groups that have built an ontology to let others know about ontologies on given topics and how to get it. Metadata on particular ontologies could let users know what a particular ontology is good good and how to find additional resources relevant to particular domains. (2JXE)
Currently the OOR that SOCoP is leveraging is at: http://oor-01.cim3.net/ontologies (Maintained by Dean and Ken Baclawski. See http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository This site currently stores many ontologies, and not just geospatial ones, but the plan is add a ‘geospatial’ category to the site to allow focused searching. (2JXF)