I beg to differ. Being a semantic web researcher myself, I can tell you that it has produced many relevant theories and artifacts that do help influence the wor

I beg to differ. Being a semantic web researcher myself, I can tell you that it has produced many relevant theories and artifacts that do help influence the world in positive ways. Here's a few to get you started: http://linkeddatafragments.org/ http://linkeddatafragments.org/ - allows to query several "semantic web" datasets at runtime by issuing several concurrent HTTP requests http://www.rdfhdt.org/ http://www.rdfhdt.org/ - allows to store graph-like data in a very compressed format that is queryable directly in memory http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_06.pdf http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2015/papers/ldow2015_paper_... - (shameless plug) allows you to query and browse semantic datasets (hosted by different people on different servers) on the web using keywords The fact that they're not useful to you does not make the entire field useless.