[kweingar]

I don't think there was ever a sustainable route to a semantic web that would work for the masses.

People wanted to write and publish. Only a small portion of people/institutions would have had the resources or appetite to tag factual information on their pages. Most people would have ignored the semantic taxonomies (or just wouldn't have published at all). I guess a small and insular semantic web is better than no semantic web, but I doubt there was a scenario where the web would have been as rich as it actually became, but was also rigidly organized.

[elevaet]

Also even if you do have good practices of semantic tagging, there are huge epistemological problems around taxonomies - who constructs them, what do the terms actually mean, how to organize them and so on.

In my experience trying to work with wikidata taxonomies, it can be a total mess when it's crowdsourced, and if you go to am "expert" derived taxonomy there are all kinds of other problems with coverage, meaning, democracy.

I've had a few flirtations with the semantic web going back to 2007 and long ago came to the personal conclusion that unfortunately AI is the only viable approach.