I'm with henrikschroder and call bullshit on semantic web being a big thing, let alone the next big thing. It's an attractive idea, but flawed. There are some n

I'm with henrikschroder and call bullshit on semantic web being a big thing, let alone the next big thing. It's an attractive idea, but flawed. There are some niches where structured semantic data will flourish (see examples in other comments), but it will be a vast subset of the web. A better idea is extracting latent semantic information from the existing messy web. However, "meaning" is extremely difficult to characterize, and attempting to encode it in an interoperable manner inevitably leads to a lowest common denominator approach. That will probably still provide tons of value and be much more ubiquitous than structured data, but will ultimately be shallow and fall far short of the vision most semantic web proponents evangelize.