will ontology help?

Simple ontologies (taxonomies) provide: *

• Controlled shared vocabulary (search engines, authors, users, databases, programs/agents all speak same language)
• Site Organization, Navigation Support, Expectation setting
• “Umbrella” Upper Level Structures (for extension e.g., UNSPSC)
• Browsing support (tagged structures such as Yahoo!)
• Search support (query expansion approaches such as FindUR, e-Cyc)
• Sense disambiguation (e.g., TAP)

and for more structured ontologies may be used in:

• Consistency checking
• Completion
• Interoperability support
• Support for validation and verification testing configuration support
• Structured, “surgical” comparative customized search
• Generalization/ Specialization
• Foundation for expansion and leverage
  
  *) cited from McGuinness' paper