One is the AI community, which sometimes develops ontologies without building systems with practical purposes, but often does build them. The second are the people writing books about data modeling patterns and analysis patterns. There are a lot of people who read these books, too. See Business
The third is the people building XML schemas and applying them to the internet, the so-called "semantic web". The third group is large and probably consists of many subgroups. All of these groupsare interested in describing the world so it can be computerized.
They study similar topics, but never talk to each other about it.Do you think this would work as a federated conference with OOPSLA? Maybe a big workshop? --RalphJohnson