Semantic Web and SPARQL were developed to solve this problem of open data. However no one uses it. Outside academic circles of Europe most people have never eve

Semantic Web and SPARQL were developed to solve this problem of open data. However no one uses it. Outside academic circles of Europe most people have never even heard of these two. Why didn't it catch on? There are I reckon two main causes: 1. No one cares. 2. Data has value only when kept behind a paywall. Data is not the new oil as oil is naturally scarce. Data is infinitely copyable. 1. Majority of people are just ignorant. They get their data magically and pay for it with watching ads. The information world starts and ends there for 99% of the populace. 2. The other 1% know very well the value of data, but only when it is kept hidden. If all data were openly available, just a federated SPARQL query away, there would be zero economic sense in founding almost any modern IT company as no profit can be made from data. There is no way to make non-copyable data. Sure one can encrypt and provide decryption keys for access. And then the receiver has the data and open sources it in semantic web and the seller can't make any more profit from the data. Law and IP rights are the only deterrent here. They don't apply globally. Even locally one needs $$$ to pay lawyers and enforce the IP. Issue number 1 is solvable with more education of the masses, so that they care. Masses later yield government officials and good stuff happens. Issue number 2 is much more nuanced. Economic incentives must be placed very carefully so as not to lead to societal collapse. I am not sure what the best way to go is but for starting out we, the people, should pressure the government (see issue 1) so that they enforce that all publicly available data, like the timetables example or all academic work funded by taxpayers, is also available behind a SPARQL endpoint. 99% won't care, some will and have for example Ubuntu Touch timetable app without HTML scrapping. For other data the question remains if open access is a good idea. I dislike all data mining by Google and Facebook but would the current Silicon Valley and USA wealth be possible if Google/Facebook open sourced their data, even if getting paid money to do so? Would a resell market form even tho it is freely available to anyone knowing SPARQL? What about private data protected by GDPR? There is also the interesting discussion about technical feasibility of SPARQL endpoints everywhere. Anyone being able to run queries everywhere is a serious security nightmare and potentially waste of compute resources. Among other things.