I have to admit, I haven't read TFA, and I'm not sure I want to. The Semantic Web has hardly failed - tons of people use the Semantic Web everyday and just don't know it. The thing is, the SW isn't necessarily meant to be something that the average end user knows about and uses explicitly. It's just about making it easier for machines to understand semantics around data on the web, so those machines can do a better job of helping the humans do whatever it is they are trying to do. So Google could be using the Semantic Web behind the scenes all day long, and the end user would never know it.

And yes, Google do use the Semantic Web.[1][3] So does Yahoo.[2][3] Etc.[3]

It doesn't matter that some people use RDFa, others use microdata, others use microformats, others use RDF/XML, others use JSON-LD or whatever. That's irrelevant syntactical details. The point is having explicitly defined semantics associated with things.

Anyway, the Semantic Web is becoming more and more important with every passing day. As tools[4] for automating the process of extracting rich semantics from unstructured data mature and become better and more widely available, the number of applications for explicit semantics is just going to mushroom.

Just to illustrate (and forgive me a bit of what might be seen as self-promotion here) - our Enterprise Social Network product, Quoddy, has Stanbol integration such that we can process all the various bits of "stuff" that flow through the system, do semantic concept extraction, and store those entities and relationships in a triplestore. Our Information Discovery Platform, Neddick, does the same thing as we consume RSS feed data, Tweets, Emails, etc. Now we can do things like show you, for, say, a given status update, the blog posts, emails, tweets, people, documents, etc, that are conceptually related. And while end-user use of "semantic queries" might not seem useful to some people, the bottom line is that this enables searches that you just can't do with "regular" (that is, non-semantic) tech.

An example... let's say you do something with musicians. Your ESN status update messages occasionally mention, say, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Marley, Richard Marx, and Madonna. How would you do a search without SW tech that says "show me all posts that mention musicians"? Not gonna happen. But with the semantic extraction + triplestore, we can make that kind of query trivial.

It gets better though... Stanbol comes "out of the box" with the ability to dereference entities that are in DBPedia and other knowledge bases, which is cool enough in it's own right... but you can also easily add local knowledge and your own custom enhancement engines. So now entities that are meaningful only in your local domain (part numbers, SKUs, customer numbers, employee ID numbers, whatever) can be semantically interlinked and queried as part of the overall knowledge graph.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Apache Stanbol (along with OpenNLP and a few related projects... UIMA, Clerezza, etc.) may just be the most important open source project around right now. And nobody has heard of it. Again, the Semantic Web is largely not something that the average end user needs to know or think about. But they'll benefit from the capabilities that semantic tech brings to the table.

<rant-over />

[1]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en&ref...

[2]: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/searchmonkey-support-rd...

[3]: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-g...

[4]: http://stanbol.apache.org/