I don’t think anyone disagrees with the proposition that the meaning, semantics of words, changes over time. And across social groups and settings.
It is like the stream described by Heraclitus, in which we can never step twice.
What meanings we assign to words, one medium of communication, are chosen from that stream at various points.
Note that I said chosen and not caught.
The words continue downstream where they may be chosen by other people with other meanings.
The notion that we can somehow fix the meaning of words, is contrary to our common and universal experience.
I wonder then why anyone would think that data structures, which are after all are composed of words and liable to the same shifting semantics as any other words, could have a fixed semantic.
That somehow data structures reside outside what we know to be the ebb and flow of semantics.
Both the words that we think of as being “data” and the words that we assign structures to hold or describe data (metadata if you like), are all part and parcel of the same stream.
The well known case of the shifting semantics of owl:sameAs is a case in point.
But you could as well pick terminology from any other vocabulary, semantic or not to illustrate the same point.
That isn’t to say that RDF or OWL aren’t useful. They are. For any number of purposes.
But, like any vocabulary, whether for data or structure, they should be used with two cautions:
1) Any term in a vocabulary stands for a subject is also represented by other terms in other vocabularies.
That is to say that a term that is used for a subject is a matter of convenience and custom, not some underlying truth.
2) Any term in a vocabulary exists in the context of other terms that represents other subjects.
A term can be best understood and communicated to others if it is documented or explained in the context of other subjects.
To say nothing of mapping terms for a subject to other terms for the same subject.
To act otherwise, as though semantics are fixed, is an attempt to step twice in the same location in a semantic stream.
Wasn’t possible for Heraclitus, isn’t possible now.