Fortunately, the situation seems to be changing. I'm glad to learn about few projects that involve building OWL ontologies. For example, Dr. Ivan Martynikhin - a young scientist from the St. Petersburg Medical University (Psychiatry and Narcology Chair) - is trying to build an ontology of psychosis. The aim is to create an ontology that in short term can back up various e-learning materials (that's the Sophia project), and, in long term, future diagnosing or EMR systems.
Another example (which I came across just today) is the group of researchers at the Geology Museum (RAS research center) who run the Formal Geology project. The project involves a geology ontology, some steps towards moving from a relational database of geological facts to an ontology-based representation, and an igneous rock classification algorithm. Docs are all in Russian (shame!) but that's fixable.
Exciting, eh? We should be thinking of organizing events to bring all these great people together. It's quite a challenge to get them to publish at OWLED or similar international workshops (for all sorts of reasons).
Finally, it'd be a remiss to not mention the semanticfuture.net founders who provided a perfect opportunity for these people to share their interests and attract attention.
