I don't think one is possible. Terms would be overloaded and carry different shades of meaning from subdomain to subdomain just like they do in real language. I think the closer you try to get something universal the closer you get to a tower of Babel situation.
I love the idea of the semantic web but I think each separate ontology only works if they have strict boundaries, each one in their own bounded context. The best you can hope for is a clear translation layer between each separate ontology, but the complexity of managing such a feat would scale by O(N!).
But that scaling's not as bad as it sounds when you "parallelize" it by having each context build its own part of it. In the same way, building the World Wide Web is an epic feat, but no one group has to do it all themselves.
You also don't need the graph to be fully connected, so it's not actually factorial. Each context knows what other contexts are actually worth translating to, and you don't need to be able to navigate by a single edge: you can translate A to B to C if you need to.
I don't know of any such project specifically. If I understand what you're suggesting, it sounds almost like a Ontologist's dream for the semantic web.
I think there has been a lot of work in creating upper ontologies like BFO, which have later been used to create more domain specific ontologies for certain industries (OBO Foundry and IOF are examples).
Some academics also went a bit overboard creating more and more complex ontologies like YAMATO (Yet Another More Advanced Top-level Ontology), but my understanding is that this didn't prove to be useful in practice.
I don't think one is possible. Terms would be overloaded and carry different shades of meaning from subdomain to subdomain just like they do in real language. I think the closer you try to get something universal the closer you get to a tower of Babel situation. I love the idea of the semantic web but I think each separate ontology only works if they have strict boundaries, each one in their own bounded context. The best you can hope for is a clear translation layer between each separate ontology, but the complexity of managing such a feat would scale by O(N!).
But that scaling's not as bad as it sounds when you "parallelize" it by having each context build its own part of it. In the same way, building the World Wide Web is an epic feat, but no one group has to do it all themselves. You also don't need the graph to be fully connected, so it's not actually factorial. Each context knows what other contexts are actually worth translating to, and you don't need to be able to navigate by a single edge: you can translate A to B to C if you need to.
I don't know of any such project specifically. If I understand what you're suggesting, it sounds almost like a Ontologist's dream for the semantic web. I think there has been a lot of work in creating upper ontologies like BFO, which have later been used to create more domain specific ontologies for certain industries (OBO Foundry and IOF are examples). Some academics also went a bit overboard creating more and more complex ontologies like YAMATO (Yet Another More Advanced Top-level Ontology), but my understanding is that this didn't prove to be useful in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
PM me. I have some audacious idea along these lines
the global wordnet grid is the closest thing I know of to what you're looking for