posted 19 years ago
I haven't heard of "major scientific organizations" doing so, but there could be plenty of efforts I just haven't happened upon yet. There are some efforts to create RDF/OWL ontologies in scientific and engineering fields, including medical terms, but they seem to be worked on at a lower level than "major organizations". Now that SNOMED is said to be openly available, it seems likely (to me, anyway) that it will be translated into OWL.
Keeping the vocabulary "under control" is of course always going to be an issue, whether Semantic Web technologies are used or not. There has been some discussion of when changes are large enough to warrent changing the URI that identifies a term. In OWL, you can say things like "This class is equivalent to that class", and "this property is deprecated". These properties are standard, and of course you can invent your own terms as well to express shades of change and deprecation.
Author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932394206/ref=jranch-20" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web</a>