On the subject of shared context for a reusable ontology, I decided to burden you all with a favorite anecdote.
In a meeting of major automotive manufacturing folk and the suppliers of their supply-chain support software, we were discussing a candidate ontology for support of “just in time” shipments using an electronic version of Kanban. At issue was whether we needed to distinguish the container from its content, because a Kanban ‘shipment’ is one or more standard packages of a single part. One of the software suppliers argued that they didn’t want to distinguish them for this project, because for these shipments “the containers are usually cardboard boxes or wood pallets with shrink wrap, which is just trash after unpacking.” A voice from the back of the room: “Really? I was thinking of rail cars. I want to use this for shipments of engines.”
-Ed