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In fact, work is now underway to take RDF Schemas one step further in the description of ontologies. (An ontology is essentially a formal description of objects and their interrelationships.) The MIT/LCS has begun to define DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language), a language for expressing ontologies. Although DAML is very much a work in progress, real work can be done now with RDF Schemas, see the section on Redfoot below.

The hardest problem in this area is not the infrastructure, but the actual ontologies themselves. Until an industry-wide ontology exists for, say , vehicle parts, there is a limit to the utility of the SW in the auto manufacturing industry. Organizations such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative have been developing such vocabularies for some time now, and they've made progress both in terms of the ontologies themselves and also tools to manage and maintain them.