Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
I have some insight here because I did a postdoc working on anatomy ontologies in the UK. A big part of the problem with the semantic web is that lots of people in European academia use it as a collection of buzzwords for making grant proposals sexier, without understanding or caring what it actually means.<p>Instead of saying, &quot;Give us money to build a webpage&quot;, they say, &quot;Give us money to expose metadata annotations using a RESTful API on the semantic web.&quot;<p>I would prepare conference presentations where I was just filling slides up with BS to fill time.<p>Devs from other universities (gotta check that international research box!) understood the technology even less than our team did. We provided them a tool for storing RDF triples for their webpage so they could store triples about anatomical relationships. They wanted to use said RDF store as their backend database for storing things like usernames and passwords. <i>facepalm</i><p>So you have all these academics publishing all this extremely important sounding literature about the semantic web, but as soon as you pry one nanometer deep, it&#x27;s nothing but a giant ball of crap.