As a beginner semantic web researcher I believe it is very successful. Just came back from an international semantic web conference [1] where a variety of usefu

As a beginner semantic web researcher I believe it is very successful. Just came back from an international semantic web conference [1] where a variety of useful, interesting and important things have been presented. I want to stress that the semantic web will probably always be a more academic field rather than "the next big thing". Similar to the artificial intelligence field or other academic fields that don't always have to lend themselves to "help industry make more money". Nonetheless lots of our technologies are being used by industry (startups and enterprises). But again, our success doesn't depend on industry adoption. It depends on how useful the things we research about are from a research point of view - which is sometimes more theoretical. As an example, most semantic web people think RDF is a more useful model than ad hoc data models because we care about generality and serendipitous reuse of data. Industry rather cares more about simple and efficient and fast tools. All in all I hope some of our findings can be useful to industry and adopted by many startups but I hope we'll always find a niche where we can do things that industry can't afford to do. In a way, semantic web exists as an academic field precisely because it's unexplored by industry. If it were widely used, perhaps we'd never need academic fields as industry would take over. I hope that never happens for the semantic web. 1. http://iswc2014.semanticweb.org/ http://iswc2014.semanticweb.org/