I'm quite sceptical that "a queryable ontology. With a rich and expressive grammar" would be so obviously easy to use and great that it threatened Google, rather than Google being a frontend for said ontology (that you still need to crawl first to use!). And indeed, what remains of semantic-web like data is massively pushed by Google today, because it makes it a easier for them to provide results based on that - and if you want to convince someone to add it to a website in a commercial setting, "it helps Google understand our site" is the primary argument that sticks (even though it also helps others parse sites).
Which IMHO points to the main problem: Publishing semantic data is work, and had no clear value proposition you could sell businesses on, and it ran out of steam before someone made a convincing one. Niches that see the need for such data publishing still are willing to use this stuff or alternatives, but for the general majority of publishers it isn't there, or actively seen as a negative.
It also didn't help that IMHO the focus was to much on what was theoretically possible, but not on making it actually easy to use, which made even more devs ignore it or build alternatives because the entry hurdle is steep. Plenty APIs could build on semantic web tech, but they don't because a custom REST API is typically just easier to do and thus more familiar. (Despite semantic tech having the groundworks for lots of what's seen as new-ish trends like API generators/machine readable API docs/...)
Which IMHO points to the main problem: Publishing semantic data is work, and had no clear value proposition you could sell businesses on, and it ran out of steam before someone made a convincing one. Niches that see the need for such data publishing still are willing to use this stuff or alternatives, but for the general majority of publishers it isn't there, or actively seen as a negative.
It also didn't help that IMHO the focus was to much on what was theoretically possible, but not on making it actually easy to use, which made even more devs ignore it or build alternatives because the entry hurdle is steep. Plenty APIs could build on semantic web tech, but they don't because a custom REST API is typically just easier to do and thus more familiar. (Despite semantic tech having the groundworks for lots of what's seen as new-ish trends like API generators/machine readable API docs/...)
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