Competitive, collaborative, and proprietary forces are all contributing to conflict resolution. I don't think the semantic Web per se will ever exist. I think what will happen is we'll just see general convergence. It's just like free trade around the world. A top-down approach doesn't usually work.
People have too much at stake.
I think it will be a bottom-up solution. Part of this bottom-up solution will be normal competitive processes. Situations with multiple standards in the same marketplace are not stable because of the advantage of doing things the same as other people. Both noted repositories act as schema servers and are associated with initiatives to create technical frameworks for XML's consistent utilization. These efforts aim to address some concerns about proprietary XML languages by proposing ways for specific industries to define XML vocabularies and defining common methods for handling and routing data transactions.