I don't think it's just an issue of people wanting a "now" solution as the article suggests. Whenever I spend time with semantic web stuff it always reeks of t

I don't think it's just an issue of people wanting a "now" solution as the article suggests. Whenever I spend time with semantic web stuff it always reeks of the problematic "over-engineered solution in search of a problem". For instance OWL starts off by defining a computationally intractable model for reasoning. That would be fine if you wanted to use it as a framework for abstractly reasoning about a subject, but no one trying to solve an actual problem starts this way. The other major warning sign (and indication of over-engineering on it's way) is a complete lack of historical context. For example rdf triples are a more verbose, and yet limited form of Prolog clauses (in a similar way that XML is essentially verbose, restricted s-exps), yet, in my experience, the vast majority of rdf 'experts' have never written a single line of Prolog, or are even loosely familiar with the idea of logic programming. Additionally if you were really trying to solve a problem you'd already have a working prototype kludged together with something that looked a lot like Prolog. The combination of a general ignorance of the problem space (knowledge representation and reasoning, logic programming etc) and a poorly defined problem imho can lead to absolutely no good, and are pretty strong evidence that most semantic web project will go nowhere.