OWL: Does it Scale?

Q: with huge ontologies on the Web, does this scale?
A: yes and no…
- obviously, reasoning over huge ontologies may be a problem
  - and combination of ontologies may lead to this
- but “a little semantics can take you far” (Jim Hendler)
- i.e., small OWL ontologies may be very powerful by themselves!
- also: applications may use “islands” of ontologies, and loosely bind them
  - remember owl:equivalentClass?
- also: applications may use “islands” of ontologies, and
  loosely bind them
  - remember owl:sameAs?
- however, further work is still needed here
- note: there are already applications with large ontologies!