A few years back I was working on a blue-sky real estate database project. I spent a lot of time trying to decide between building the project with a triple sto

A few years back I was working on a blue-sky real estate database project. I spent a lot of time trying to decide between building the project with a triple store or an RDBMS. The reason I mention this is that the parent notes that "professional onotologies are expensive to create and maintain" which is very true, but even worse, like Shirky's DSM example, you have to be an expert in the ontology to make good use of it! To me, this was the critical argument against doing the project with a triple store, and ultimately, made me a pessimistic cynic of the semantic web. I can't put my finger on it, but it just feels way too complex to work in reality. People don't like systems that manifest themselves as deterministic (not sure if that's the right word) but then act heuristically. However, people are fine with a heuristic system that acts that way. Ex: google.