Preventing ontology interoperability problems instead of solving them

A major source of interoperability problems on the Semantic Web are the different vocabularies used in metadata descriptions. This paper argues that instead of solving interoperability problems we should focus more effort on avoiding the problems in the first place, in the spirit of Albert Einstein's quote "Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them". For this purpose, coordinated collaborative development of open source vocabularies and centralized publication of them as public vocabulary services are proposed. Methods, guidelines, and tools to facilitate this have been developed on a national level in the Finnish FinnONTO initiative, and are now in pilot use with applications and promising first results