In 2003 I was in an EU project (Agentcities) that did interoperability demonstrations for distributed knowledge applications. We had to develop and use ontologi

In 2003 I was in an EU project (Agentcities) that did interoperability demonstrations for distributed knowledge applications. We had to develop and use ontologies for ticketing, transport - and a few other similar things. My honest expectation was that building these ontologies would take about a week of group effort. As I remember it we were still at it months later. This convinced me that the SW was a bust. Moreover one of the roadblocks we hit was very illuminating to me. Creating the ontologies and onward development/extension of them was hard because the tools were so poor (also other things like it is just... hard) but the lack of tools was widely noted as a clear issue. No one did anything about it. We had protege then, and lo it is so now.