I wouldn't go so far as saying it has outright failed - it has made inroads in some areas, such as biblio databases and metadata in academic publishing in gener

I wouldn't go so far as saying it has outright failed - it has made inroads in some areas, such as biblio databases and metadata in academic publishing in general. HTML metadata, microformats, and schema.org sees lots of use in SEO. Its applications weren't just as wide as initially envisioned, simply because giving away your data in an open format isn't a money-maker, in contrast to putting up a website displaying data along with ads and tracking. > We were promised utopia That sentence reveals another aspect (a misunderstanding IMHO): that "semantic web" and XML was shovelled onto you by a clueless academic ivory-tower elite, an anti-establishment narrative instrumental in the rise of HTML5, WHATWG and the post-standards world we live in today. What kindof sucks with W3C's semantic web tech stack is that it captured a lot, yet was impractical, incomplete, and delivered very little. Even TBL's SOLID stack for the dweb uses semweb "creatively" for discovering graph URLs offered by a remote website for replication, by enumerating files/URLs with regexp filtering and similar mechanisms. Semweb has for a long time captured logic programming and description logic; only recently are Prolog and Datalog re-discovered as much more practical means for implementing graph and logic databases.