You think if not for semantic web, the dbpedia folks would've just shrugged and said "oh well, if only someone had invented a way for us to share knowledge"?

It's like saying J.K. Rowling couldn't have written Harry Potter if not for Bloomsbury Publishing's in-house style rules.

That's semantic web for you. Dbpedia is a project whose value is 99.9999999999% comprised of its content, 0.00000000001% comprised of semantic web scaffolding, and semantic web comes along and claims full credit for the entire thing.