Hacker News Reader

I think foaf is still the most widely used ontology... it's really a pretty well thought out data model.

I was trying to give a response along the lines of "that's like saying <x> is the most widely used <y>", but couldn't actually think of anything that made my point.

My point was going to be that pretty much no-one really uses ontologies.

Ontologies have been used for quite a while in enterprises for things like information integration (EII). It also depends of how strict your definition of ontology is. If you ask me, RSS standard is the most widely used ontology on the web. IMO, the reason why FOAF, DC and similar standards never took off is beacause, unlike for RSS, there were never really any "killer" applications that utilized them.

You'd be surprised how much ontologies are catching on these days. Have a look at http://linkeddata.org/

Ontologies and linking different ontologies have become a key part in unlocking large data sets such as Wikipedia, from governments, et cetera.

yep it is a bit of a niche, but if you poke into an awful lot of rdf files you'll see foaf:

Reply on news.ycombinator.com