The Semantic Web is alive and well and doing great, thank you very much. You should drop by some time and check out the real thing. Unfortunately, hype in any f

The Semantic Web is alive and well and doing great, thank you very much. You should drop by some time and check out the real thing. Unfortunately, hype in any field will attract losers and opportunists, but why focus on the negative? Never mind academia: Some of the world's largest companies are investing serious money in semantic-web approaches to get a grip of their information resources. You won't see it because it's mostly behind the scenes, in intranets and infrastructure that feeds data to your nice shiny restaurant recommender, or whatever. The software stack is getting better and more robust-- you can do things quickly with billions of triples that would take you weeks of development to program in a non-trivial relational database environment. The Semantics 2018 conference just took place in Vienna. It was heavy in industry presence and there was a lot of money going around. These guys guys don't give money outside the company unless they're going to get value for it. So yes, reports of the imminent arrival of the Semantic Web ten years ago were greatly exaggerated. But if you're looking for a topic with an amusingly clueless commentariat, you'll do better to google "PHP object-oriented programming" (or just "hacker", for that matter).