[1] In the past, many organizations that created custom database application used isolated teams of developers that did not formally publish their data definitions.
The ontology spectrum was also featured in a talk at the Semantics for the Web meeting in 2000 at Dagstuhl by Deborah McGuinness.
McGuinness produced a paper describing the points on that spectrum that appeared in the book that emerged (much later) from that workshop called "Spinning the Semantic Web."
The company Cerebra has also popularized this concept by describing the data formats that exist within an enterprise in their ability to store semantically precise metadata.
Their list includes: What these concepts share in common is the ability to store information with increasing precision to facilitate intelligent agents.