As someone who was once a huge semantic web advocate, in retrospect there are so many issues with semweb which make it obvious it was never going to succeed. F

As someone who was once a huge semantic web advocate, in retrospect there are so many issues with semweb which make it obvious it was never going to succeed. For starters, just like XML is a poor, verbose re-implementation of s-expressions (I still love Erik Naggum's rant on this topic [0]), RDF is an equally verbose reimplementation of Prolog clauses. During the early 2000s many technologies, myself included, where infected with some sort of weird mind virus that made us think reimplementing everything in human readable markup derived from SGML was a great thing. Prolog already had problems succeeding, there is no reason to believe a more difficult to implement version would succeed. Then there's the issue that for a true semantic web you need armies of people creating trustworthy metadata. Even if you have tools to autogenerate RDF (like we do for semantic metatags today), you're not going to have a really interesting "web" of data without massive amounts of selfless labor. That selfless part is important because there's no monetary advantage to producing tons of well curated RDF... look at how much effort website put into resisting screen scraping. Additionally you have Prolog clauses without Prolog's reasoning power!. SPARQL is just a query language, not a tool for automated reasoning. The OWL spec started with a definition of a reasoning engine that was computationally intractable. The idea of running Prolog on a web of clauses is compelling but to this day we don't have a reasoning engine. The closest thing would be to just load wikidata into SWI-Prolog. In a surprising number of ways Semweb shares the same problem that crypto does: a distributed, public, trusted, cryptographically ensured immutable ledger is a very interesting technical solution. However in practice there are almost no problems for which it is the correct solution. The vast majority of Semweb "solutions" can also be solve with relational databases and a public facing API. 0. https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html\ https://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-xmlrant.html\