and to Patrick Lambe: http://www.organisingknowledge.com/

I like your coral analogy for how taxonomies need to survive. One effort I am working is to enable an interchange of metadata associated with rich media asset between businesses. This effectively requires a ‘mapping’ between each business’ view of their media together with establishing the industry standards (the spine) as that develops.

To enable this interchange requires that the metadata can be strongly attached to the media and that the data format is flexible enough to enable semantic mapping - I’ve distilled these principles as SAMSN - Strongly Attached Metadata with Semantic Namespaces. More info here:
http://bit.ly/91rhIV

I sum up the opportunity to that of the supply chain revolution that was enabled by standardizing on the barcode as a common touch point which enabled various production, inventory and retail information systems to work together. SAMSN based metadata enables the barcode for rich media.

Enabling it will require a healthy dose of human cooperation and mindfulness in the mapping of the taxonomies. But the good news is that most of the basic technology to enable this is already here.

The Open World Assumption: Elephant in the Room
http://www.mkbergman.com/852/the-open-world-assumption-elephant-in-the-room/
OWA Enables Incremental, Low-risk Wins for the Semantic Enterprise