> The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. True. Demonstrable in the health-care IT world. Think of electronic health records.

> The semantic web is not a technical problem, it's an incentive problem. True. Demonstrable in the health-care IT world. Think of electronic health records. My personal portable electronic health record would either be a bunch of images of scrawled notes and maybe some nice medical images ( = nonsemantic web) Or it would be in a highly wrought format, i dunno, XML or something, with carefully worked out schemata for everything from flu shot records to heart transplants (= semantic web). Back in 2007-2010, "electronic health records" EHR were spottily and sloppily implemented by some providers. But, in the US, a federal law pushed more widespread implemetation. Now my online EHR, and yours, is decidedly app-mediated and non-semantic, on a web site portal. Export to JSON? Hah. No. The hospitals and health care systems only did it because of incentives. I happened to work at a B2B SaaS company focused on making connections between hospitals and rehab/skilled nursing providers. A rehab outfit can't decide to accept a patient without seeing her medical records and doctors' orders. So our customers had a real incentive to be able to share records. It worked. But the data we had access to (go read about HL7) was not even close to semantic. And our SQL database schemas were, umm, quinquiremes of Nineveh, really intricate, somewhat brittle. Let's leave privacy issues out of the conversation for a moment. Publishing the schema and accepting random queries would help NOBODY except some partner outfit willing to develop and test useful stuff. Hey, I got an idea! Let's give them an API! Oh, wait, nobody wants to bother with an API? OK, how about a nice web site! And we're back where we started. With a universal semantic web, the same problems would crop up everywhere.