The $64,000 question is: how do you implement the semantic web without changing any HTML or backend code? Because the web is never going to change to adopt a s

The $64,000 question is: how do you implement the semantic web without changing any HTML or backend code? Because the web is never going to change to adopt a semantic web standard. What we have now are facsimiles of the semantic web, things like Open Graph (which only provides the gist of page media, if that), proprietary search engine results, and proprietary APIs for walled gardens like Facebook. It's looking like machine learning is going to provide richer gists and then manually-coded directories will provide user interface controllers for those gists in Alexa and other agents. It's a far cry from a truly semantic web but most people won't know the difference. This is actually a pretty easy problem to solve, but to do it, we'd be running against the wind of capitalism. The semantic web is running behind the scenes at Google, ad agencies, even the NSA. Except they've built it around people's private data instead of publicly accessible documents. Just to throw some ideas out there, I would start with the low-lying fruit: we need a fully-indexed document store that doesn't barf on mangled data. We need a compelling reason for people to have public profiles again (or an open and secure web of trust for remote API access). We need annotated public relationship graphs akin to ImageNet or NIST for deriving the most commonly-used semantics (edit: DBpedia is a start). Totally doable, but developers gotta pay rent.