You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one. By that argument we would never have a human language unless everybody spoke the same language. Turns out once you have well developed languages (and you do, because they are useful even when not universal) you can translate between them. Not perfectly, but generally good enough.
Developing such linking tools between ontologies would be worthwhile if there are multiple ontologies covering the same domain, provided they are actually used (i.e., there are large datasets for each). Alas, instead of a bottom-up, organic approach people try to solve this with top-down, formal (upper-level) ontologies [1] and Leibnizian dreams of an underlying universality [2], which only adds to the cognitive load.
> You point out a real problem but it does not feel like an unsurmountable and terminal one
In our spoken language the agents doing the parsing are human AI's (actual intelligences) able to deal with most of the finer nuances in semantics, and still making numerous errors in many contexts that lead to misunderstanding, i.e. parse errors.
There was this hand-waving promise in semantic web movement of "if only we make everything machine-readable, then .." magic would happen. Undoubtedly unlocking numerous killer apps, if only we had these (increasingly complex) linked data standards and related tools to define and parse 'universal meaning'.
An overreach, imho. Semantic web was always overpromising yet underdelivering. There may be new use cases in combinations of SM with ML/LLM but I don't think they'll be a vNext of the web anytime soon.
Developing such linking tools between ontologies would be worthwhile if there are multiple ontologies covering the same domain, provided they are actually used (i.e., there are large datasets for each). Alas, instead of a bottom-up, organic approach people try to solve this with top-down, formal (upper-level) ontologies [1] and Leibnizian dreams of an underlying universality [2], which only adds to the cognitive load.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_ontology
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis