I took TBL's Semantic Web class ("Linked Data Ventures") when I was a grad student in the fall of 2010. The class was well structured, and included an introduct

I took TBL's Semantic Web class ("Linked Data Ventures") when I was a grad student in the fall of 2010. The class was well structured, and included an introduction to basic concepts and languages, lectures by people using it in production environments, and group projects. I wrote an account of the first class here (http://www.ilamont.com/2010/09/encounter-with-tim-berners-lee-and.html http://www.ilamont.com/2010/09/encounter-with-tim-berners-le...) and you can see a demo of the rudimentary educational app our team built here (http://www.ilamont.com/2011/03/challenges-of-creating-mobile.html http://www.ilamont.com/2011/03/challenges-of-creating-mobile...). As the title of the class indicates, the idea was to encourage the creation of real-world applications, and to that end the class groups were encouraged to have a mix of Course 6 and business school team members. At the time, it seemed that the Semantic Web was more of an academic/open source project rather than something that was widely embraced by developers, although some guest speakers did have working applications at their places of business. I think the hope was to seed the Cambridge startup ecosystem with SW/Linked Data examples that could encourage its spread into the real world. One of the teams in our class actually turned their project into a startup that was later acquired. I ran into one of the co-founders a few years later and asked if they continued to use the Semantic Web/Linked Data model that they had demoed in class. The answer: No, because it couldn't scale. That was an issue that was anticipated and discussed during the class, but there was hopeful talk that scaling issues would be resolved in the near future through various initiatives.