I think we must be careful not to mistake use of the buzzword ‘ontology’ for understanding the concept. Many people in the information exchange business have finally realized that getting everyone of interest to agree on a common XML schema is not going to happen. Et voilà, we have discovered the need for information modeling, of a kind that supports the notion ‘synonym’ (or ‘close enough for our purpose’). And even better we have not one, but two, W3C standards for this – RDF and OWL. And there are tools that support them. It is an ‘in’ technology in the land of information exchange, right up there with Linked Open Data.
IMO, this is a very good thing, because it is a giant step above capturing knowledge in Java and in XML Schema. It gets us much closer to capturing what we know, in a way that might be useful for multiple purposes.
OTOH, most of the would-be users have no concept of what it takes to make a model suitable for inferencing, or even that they might want to draw inferences. They get the general idea of classes and properties; most of them don’t understand axioms other than Subclass and EquivalentClasses. They are given to understand that there are engines that can do magic with these models. The fact is that if you really want to do the magic, the ontologies have to be purpose-built and carefully crafted: OWL as the implementation language for DL reasoners. It is a different concept, and people who are expecting magic from their E-R models captured in OWL and RDF triple stores will be disappointed. That is the fate of silver bullets.
It falls on those of us who have the knowledge engineering skills to build good reference ontologies that modeling groups can incorporate, and to support the activities of modeling groups who, as a body, have only come to understand OWL and RDF at the Entities and Relationships (aka Classes and Properties) level. What we produce will support a little inferencing magic, and provide examples for the domain modelers who really want to learn the knowledge engineering trade.
-Ed