Semantic Web/Facilitating Evolvability

How do we document the evolution of languages? This is a very important and indeed urgent question, and one which Tim Berners-Lee summarized quite neatly:- "Where for example a library of congress schema talks of an "author", and a British Library talks of a "creator", a small bit of RDF would be able to say that for any person x and any resource y, if x is the (LoC) author of y, then x is the (BL) creator of y. This is the sort of rule which solves the evolvability problems. Where would a processor find it? [...]"

One possible answer is: third-party databases. Very often, it is not practical to have (in Tim Berners-Lee's example) either the LoC or or BL record the fact that two of their fields are the same, so this information will have to be recorded by a reputable third party.

One such "third party" that was set up to investigate this is SWAG, the Semantic Web Agreement Group. Co-founded by Seth Russell, Sean B. Palmer, Aaron Swartz, and William Loughborough, the group aims to ensure interoperability on the Semantic Web. They set up what is possibly the first ever third-party Semantic Web dictionary, the WebNS SWAG Dictionary.