jeremiem

I would recommend anyone that struggle to discuss divisive or controversial topics to learn and watch Street Epistemology [0], or Compassionate Epistemology [1]. It's comparable to a Socratic dialog.

The basic idea that I got out of it is to unwrap one, and only one, person's beliefs at the time, find their best reason for that belief and see if the reason holds if it was used to believe something else. Repeat with the next best if not. By hiding your opinion on a topic, it's a lot easier to explore someone else's as they shouldn't get defensive or combative.

There are a lot of videos of this kind of interview, my favorite channel: Cordial Curiosity[2].

While I don't work in the domain, the ontologies in the OBO Foundry and all the ones deriving from Basic Formal Ontology[0] have some level of compatibility that make their integration possible. Still far from "one schema to rule them all" but it shows that agreement can be achieved.

There are other initiatives that I'm aware of that could also qualify as a step in the right direction: "e-Government Core Vocabularies" and the "European Materials Modelling Ontology".

I hope and want to believe that, sooner than later, we will have formalized definitions for most practical aspects of our lives.

I believe that we actually can generalize modelling. We have dictionaries filled with definitions, given enough time and discipline, I don't see why we couldn't make them formal. It's not an engineering problem though.