I do research in this field but I am a programmer by training before I entered this research field. I have talked to many academics and they agree that industry needs something simpler, more approachable and something that solves their problems in a more direct way, so it's definitely not an "academic exercise" for many researchers.
However, I failed to convince people that we need to implement the 2001 SciAm use case (https://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/cours/essi2006/Scientific%20..., see the intro before the first section) using 2021 technologies (smartphones are here, assistants are here, shared calendars are easy, companies have APIs, the only thing missing is a proper glue using semantic web tech). This goes to the core thesis of this paper that semantic web is awesome as the set of ideas and approaches but the Semantic Web as the result of all this work may look underwhelming or irrelevant today. I like to point everyone who disagrees with me to the 1994 TimBL presentation at CERN (https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957) where he talks about the early vision of semantic web (https://imgur.com/aS2dbf6 or around 05:00 in the video), which looks awfully like IoT (many years before the term even existed). We simply cannot fault someone who envisioned communication technologies for IoT in 1994 for getting the technology a bit wrong.
Today's technologies simply cannot handle the use-cases for which SemWeb was designed for properly:
1) The web is still not suitable for machines. Yes, we have IoT devices that use APIs but nobody will say it's truly M2M communication at its best. When APIs go down devices get bricked, there is no way to get those devices to talk to any other APIs. There is no way for two devices in a house to talk to each other unless they were explicitly programmed to do so.
2) We don't have common definitions for the simplest of terms. Schema.org made a progress but it's very limited because it serves search engine interest, not the IoT community. There is no reason something like XML NS or RDF NS should not be used across every microservice in a company. Using a key (we call them predicates, but not important here) "email:mbox" (defined in https://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/ very long time ago) you can globally denote the value is an email.
3) Correctness of data and endpoint definition still matters. We threw away XML and WSDL but came back to develop JSON Schema and Swagger.
We are trying to get there. JSON Schema, Swagger etc. all make efforts in the direction of the problems SemWeb tried to address. One of the most "semantic" efforts I see done recently is GraphQL federation, which has been a semantic web dream for a long while: being able to get the information you need by querying more than one API. This only indicates the problems that semantic web tried to address are still viable.
If anyone has attempted an OSS reimplementation of the 2001 "Pete and Lucy" semantic web use case (ie as an Android app and a bunch of microservices), please point me in the right direction. Otherwise, if anyone is interested in doing it, I am all ears (https://gitter.im/linkeddata/chat is an active place for the LOD/EKG/SW discussion).
We wasted 20 years by trying to replace one form of brackets with the other (XML vs. JSON). WHATWG and the browser vendors are responsible for this. Just like for the fact that we still don't have a machine-readable web. FAANG crawls the structured schema.org metadata like nobody else can and profits from it, and the rest of use are left with the HTML5 and Javascript crap.
However, I failed to convince people that we need to implement the 2001 SciAm use case (https://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/cours/essi2006/Scientific%20..., see the intro before the first section) using 2021 technologies (smartphones are here, assistants are here, shared calendars are easy, companies have APIs, the only thing missing is a proper glue using semantic web tech). This goes to the core thesis of this paper that semantic web is awesome as the set of ideas and approaches but the Semantic Web as the result of all this work may look underwhelming or irrelevant today. I like to point everyone who disagrees with me to the 1994 TimBL presentation at CERN (https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957) where he talks about the early vision of semantic web (https://imgur.com/aS2dbf6 or around 05:00 in the video), which looks awfully like IoT (many years before the term even existed). We simply cannot fault someone who envisioned communication technologies for IoT in 1994 for getting the technology a bit wrong.
Today's technologies simply cannot handle the use-cases for which SemWeb was designed for properly:
1) The web is still not suitable for machines. Yes, we have IoT devices that use APIs but nobody will say it's truly M2M communication at its best. When APIs go down devices get bricked, there is no way to get those devices to talk to any other APIs. There is no way for two devices in a house to talk to each other unless they were explicitly programmed to do so.
2) We don't have common definitions for the simplest of terms. Schema.org made a progress but it's very limited because it serves search engine interest, not the IoT community. There is no reason something like XML NS or RDF NS should not be used across every microservice in a company. Using a key (we call them predicates, but not important here) "email:mbox" (defined in https://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/ very long time ago) you can globally denote the value is an email.
3) Correctness of data and endpoint definition still matters. We threw away XML and WSDL but came back to develop JSON Schema and Swagger.
We are trying to get there. JSON Schema, Swagger etc. all make efforts in the direction of the problems SemWeb tried to address. One of the most "semantic" efforts I see done recently is GraphQL federation, which has been a semantic web dream for a long while: being able to get the information you need by querying more than one API. This only indicates the problems that semantic web tried to address are still viable.
If anyone has attempted an OSS reimplementation of the 2001 "Pete and Lucy" semantic web use case (ie as an Android app and a bunch of microservices), please point me in the right direction. Otherwise, if anyone is interested in doing it, I am all ears (https://gitter.im/linkeddata/chat is an active place for the LOD/EKG/SW discussion).