OK, so the title is pure click bait, but here's the thing. It seems to me that the Semantic Web as classically conceived (RDF/XML, SPARQL, triple stores) has had relatively little impact outside academia, whereas other technologies such as JSON, NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, CouchDB) and graph databases (e.g., Neo4J) have got a lot of developer mindshare.
In biodiversity informatics the Semantic Web has been a round for a while. We've been pumping out millions of RDF documents (mostly served by LSIDs) since 2005 and, to a first approximation, nothing has happened. I've repeatedly blogged about why I think this is (see this post for a summary).
I was an early fan of RDF and the Semantic Web, but soon decided that it was far more hassle than it was worth. The obsession with ontologies, the problems of globally unique identifiers based on HTTP (http-14 range, anyone?), the need to get a lot of ducks in a row all mad it a colossal pain. Then I discovered the NoSQL document database CouchDB, which is a JSON store that features map-reduce views rather than on the fly queries. To somebody with a relational database background this is a bit of a headfuck:
But CouchDB has a great interface, can be replicated to the cloud, and is FUN (how many times can you say that about a database?). So I starting playing with CouchDB for small projects, then used it to build BioNames and more recently moved BioStor to CouchDB hosted both locally and in the cloud.
Then there are graph databases such as Neo4J, which has some really cool things such as GraphGists which is a playground where you can create interactive graphs and query them (here's an example I created). Once again, this is FUN.
Another big trend over the last decade is the flight from XML and its hideous complexities (albeit coupled with great power) to the simplicity of JSON (part of the rise of JavaScript). JSON makes it very easy to pass around data in simple key-value documents (with more complexity such as lists if you need them). Pretty much any modern API will serve you data in JSON.
So, what happened to RDF? Well, along with a plethora of formats (XML, triples, quads, etc., etc.) it adopted JSON in the form of JSON-LD (see JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web for background). JSON-LD lets you have data in JSON (which both people and machines find easy to understand) and all the complexity/clarity of having the data clearly labelled using controlled vocabularies such as Dublin Core and schema.org. This complexity is shunted off into a "@context" variable where it can in many cases be safely ignored.
But what I find really interesting is that instead of JSON-LD being a way to get developers interested in the rest of the Semantic Web stack (e.g. HTTP URIs as identifiers, SPARQL, and triple stores), it seems that what it is really going to do is enable well-described structured to get access to all the cool things being developed around JSON. For example, we have document databases such as CouchDB which speaks HTTP and JSON, and search servers such as ElasticSearch which make it easy to work with large datasets. There are also some cool things happening with graph databases and Javascript, such as Hexastore (see also Weiss, C., Karras, P., & Bernstein, A. (2008, August 1). Hexastore. Proc. VLDB Endow. VLDB Endowment. http://doi.org/10.14778/1453856.1453965, PDF here) where we create the six possible indexes of the classic RDF [subject,predicate,object] triple (this is the sort of thing can also be done in CouchDB). Hence we can have graph databases implemented in a web browser!
So, when we see large-scale "Semantic Web" applications that actually exist and solve real problems, we may well be more likely to see technologies other than the classic Semantic Web stack. As an example, see the following paper:
Szekely, P., Knoblock, C. A., Slepicka, J., Philpot, A., Singh, A., Yin, C., … Ferreira, L. (2015). Building and Using a Knowledge Graph to Combat Human Trafficking. The Semantic Web - ISWC 2015. Springer Science + Business Media. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25010-6_12
There's a free PDF here, and a talk online. The consortium behind this project researchers did extensive text mining, data cleaning and linking, creating a massive collection of JSON-LD documents. Rather than use a triple store and SPARQL, they indexed the JSON-LD using ElasticSearch (notice that they generated graphs for each of the entities they care about, in a sense denormalising the data).
I think this is likely to be the direction many large-scale projects are going to be going. Use the Semantic Web ideas of explicit vocabularies with HTTP URIs for definitions, encode the data in JSON-LD so it's readable by developers (no developers, no projects), then use some of the powerful (and fun) technologies that have been developed around semi-structured data. And if you have JSON-LD, then you get SEO for free by embedding that JSON-LD in your web pages.
In summary, if biodiversity informatics wants to play with the Semantic Web/linked data then it seems obvious that some combination of JSON-LD with NoSQL, graph databases, and search tools like ElasticSearch are the way to go.
