"Every successful project which is linked in any way to semantic web, would have been successful without the semantic web."

I was thinking many times of it. For most of the time it is true, but not always. I still can find few good examples. Look at dbpedia. It may look messy, but there is vast amount of data there, that is taken advantage of by many projects (also commercial). While i can imagine making a database with the same data, it is the "linked data" initiative that gave it such possibilities.

I agree that there were huge loads of money spent on it, and many projects simply didn't deliver what was promised. But anyway, does research always succeeds in 100% of the cases?