---
title: "RDF Is Dead"
description: 
date: 2025-03-07T10:24:52+01:00
image: 
math: 
tags:
 - semantic web
license: 
hidden: false
comments: true
draft: false
---

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~~](https://terminusdb.com/blog/the-semantic-web-is-dead/) (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.
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