Seems to miss the obvious double whammy:
1) Because it burdens producers to no obvious benefit, a problem forever
2) Because progress over time in language processing makes it less and less necessary
1) Because it burdens producers to no obvious benefit, a problem forever
2) Because progress over time in language processing makes it less and less necessary
(1) is more fundamental: a lot of value-add annotation (in RDF or other forms) would be valuable, but because there is work involved those that have it don't give it away for free. This part was not sufficiently addressed in the OP: the Incentive Problem. Either there needs to be a way how people pay for the value-add metadata, or there has to be another benefit for the provider why they would give it away. Most technical articles focus on the format, or on some specific ontologies (typically without an application).
A third issue is trust. In Berners-Lee's original paper, trust is shown as an extra box, suggesting it is a component. That's a grave misunderstanding: trust is a property of the whole system/ecosystem; you can't just take a prototype and say "now let's add a trust module to it!" In the absence of trust guarantees, who ensures that the metadata that does exist is correct? It may just be spam (annotation spam may be the counterpart of Web spam in the unstructured world).
No Semantic Web until the Incentive Problem and the Trust Problem are solved.
No. The semweb is already functional as is (see my other comments here). Trust is orthogonal and can/is being solved in different ways (centralized/decentralized as in Wikidata/ORCIDs/org-ID-URIs).
The climate crisis is a somewhat comparable example - it requires changing behavior on a massive scale for abstract benefit. In the climate case the benefit is much more fundamental than what semweb promises. And despite massive pain and effort we are very very far from addressing it. Thinking semweb would happen just cuz it sounds cool is super naive.
- SPARQL is _a lot better_ than the many different forms of SQL.
- Adding some JSON-LD can be done through simple JSON metadata. Something people using Wordpress are already able to do. All this will be more and more automated.
- The benefit is ontological cohesion across the whole web. Please take a look at the https://conze.pt project and see what this can bring you. The benefit is huge. Simple integration with many different stores of information in a semantically precise way.
2) AI/NLP is never completely precise and requires huge resources (which require centralization). The basics of the semantic web will be based on RDF (whether created through some AI or not), SPARQL, ontologies and extended/improved by AI/NLP. Its a combination of the two that is already being used for Wikipedia and Wikidata search results.
This has no benefit for the person who has to pay to do the work. Why would I pay someone to mark up all my data, just for the greater good? When humans are looking/using my products, none of this is visible. It's not built into any tools, it doesn't get me more SEO, and it doesn't get me any more sales.
Meanwhile, why would say Mouser or Airbnb pay someone to markup their docs? WebMD? Clearly nothing has been compelling them to do so thus far, and when you’re talking about harvesting data and using it elsewhere, it’s a difficult argument to make. Google already gets them plenty of traffic without these efforts.
Also, I just checked: WebMD is using a ton of embedded RDF on each page. They understand SEO well as you said :)
A refinement on your second point is that the groups who would have benefited the most from semantic web were the googles of the world, but they were also the ones who needed it the least. Because they were well ahead of everybody else at building the NLP to extract structure from the existing www. In fact the existence of semantic web would have eroded their key advantage. So the ones in a position to encourage this and make it happen didn’t want it at all. So it was always DOA.