## RDF Is Dead

A big part of my research has been around vocabularies and semantic annotation. And, to be honest, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the field. To the point where I dread having to work on it. Some day I will write about it in length, but today I’ve stumbled upon a post that covers the topic quite well: The Semantic Web is Dead - Long Live the Semantic Web (styling mine).

In particular, this section has really resonated with me:

> # Academics and Industry

> The political economy of academia and its interaction with industry is the origin of our current lack of a functional Semantic Web.

> Academia is structured in a way that there is very little incentive for anyone to build usable software. Instead, you are elevated for rapidly throwing together an idea, a tiny proof of concept, and to iterate on microscopic variations of this thing to produce as many papers as possible.

> In engineering, the devil is in the detail. You really need to get into the weeds before you can know what the right thing to do is. This is simultaneously a devastating situation for industry and academia. Nobody is going to wait around for a team of engineers to finish building a system to write about it in Academia. You’ll be passed immediately by legions of paper pushers. And in industry, you can’t just be mucking about with a system that you might have to throw away.