Earthly use of ontology

["Allen Razdow" <arazdow@mathsoft.com>]

Fascinating discussions of what's beyond ontologies, but in a practical
vein, I wonder if anyone shares the view that developing ontologies is
useful as a step in the engineering of robust schemas?  

Someone said to me "everyone uses ontologies all the time, they just
don't write them down."  

If you DO write down an ontology for a given domain, you can do so
without worrying about readability, transformability, whether to make
something an attribute, element or content and so forth.  These
decisions should come easier once you have a handle on the ontology.
Also, we suppose that having several schemata for different purposes
makes more sense if they are all in correspondence with the ontology.

I suppose its like developing an entity-relationship model of data
before worrying about concrete schemas which must be normalized,
efficient, etc.

Anyone have experience with this? 

-Allen