An agenda for the humanities community working in the semantic web
What is important to note here is not that potential solutions already exist in the database and knowledge base communities, but that the humanities community is not engaging with these solutions on any significant scale. Rather, the humanities community is focused on building large repositories and continues to choose the assert the most threadbare vocabularies as the means of enabling this goal. As suggested earlier, the consequence of this will be information juke boxes, repositories that are able to dish up preselected information through generic interfaces, but little more.
What the humanities community needs to be doing on a larger scale is the following:
1) Constructing more custom ontologies directed at capturing humanities-relevant information rather than adopting those built by other communities for other purposes;
2) Pursuing the ontology integration techniques already developed to address the challenges of integration, despite their complexity and the real possibility that they will not work;
3) Designing inference engines specifically for humanities research.