It seems like what's missing is a tag dictionary which is able to group & graph relationships between words based on their actual definition. Such as being able to place in a hierarchy "Fruit" within the context of "plant" "apple" "leaf" in a way which would be relevant. It would be difficult to create such a dictionary, and to keep it modern might even be more difficult. If you look at something like Wiki-pedia(which has hyperlink style references to related topics and words which are connected to other words/topics), and you stripped out of that all of the back story and just kept the main topic and the words which are hyperlinked, organized these words in a treestyle hierarchy, and built a comparative reference based on common typos and variations, you might get close to the tool you're looking for. Such a task might seem nightmarish at first, but since there are much fewer words and phrases in existence than new ones every year, eventually the tool would become useful.

I felt the same way when I was doing research into this, about 4 years ago now. I think that basically describes a universal ontology, and the fact is that such a thing has massive hurdles, not least because of multiple word meanings.

Sadly, you'd have to put "Fruit" not only into the context of the words you noted (and others), but also in the context of the slang usage for "effeminate" or "gay". "apple" would have to be linked to the fruit-plant sense and the computer-hardware-software-corporation sense and the Beatles-music sense, etc. etc.

Wikipedia handles that with those disambiguation pages, as would (presently at least) any sufficiently complex word-to-word or phrase-to-phrase ontology. Or, that's my meagre understanding of the situation at least.

-k

RE: The Need for Creating Tag Standards