[tasogare]

I shared the experience described by the grand parent. In particular I remember I had some argument on HN with a few people and the sheer amount of bad faith and technical inaccuracy thrown at me was jaw dropping. At this point I consider SW more a cult than a technology.

On the research side there are two kinds of research papers: the one that proposes an ontology for a domain, and the one that describes the conversion of an existing resource to RDF. I've never seen a paper where SW was used for something new and interesting and that would have been impossible without SW.

That being said, they are also both technical and conceptual pain points that are plaguing RDF. Basically the tech is trying to address too many things: both metadata and data, and every kind of data. "IRIs that can be URLs than can be sometimes dereferenced and sometimes not, but it's better if they are and then it's Linked Data" kind of thing makes it hard to assume (and thus build) anything.

So, RDF have been success in a few domains (biology) but in most case it doesn't offer a real competitive advantage over simpler and more expressive technologies such as graph databases.

PS: @zcw100 if you where to really write a book about semantic web, drop me a line please.