That might be the case for the internet, but in a company there can be real dedicated curation resources and a policy-driven schema and naming convention. I thi

That might be the case for the internet, but in a company there can be real dedicated curation resources and a policy-driven schema and naming convention. I think the viability is different depending on the use case. That said, I'm not sure universal exchange formats like OWL are really necessary for any use case. Maybe RDF is even overkill, but the concept of subject-predicate-object triples is powerful and opens up a nice space for using rules engines to explore amorphous and multi-dimensional graphs of data. Also I think the line between data and metadata is pretty blurry and not so easy to separate. At what point is a property of an entity considered "meta"? I'd argue that if the thing it is on can be considered an entity at all, that collecting data about it is just part of the concrete definition.