If even the semantic web people are declaring victory based on a post title and a picture for better integration with Facebook, then it's clear that Semantic Web as it was envisioned is fully 100% dead and buried. The concept of OWL and the other standards was to annotate the content of pages, that's where the real values lie. Each paragraph the author wrote should have had some metadata about its topic. At the very…
"We've achieved victory! After over 25 years, if you want to know who wrote a blog post, you can get it from a few sites this way!"
I'd call it damning with faint success, except it really isn't even success. Relative to the promises of "Semantic Web" it's simply a failure. And it's not like Semantic Web was overpromised a bit, but there were good ideas there and the reality is perhaps more prosaic but also useful. No, it's just useless. It failed, and LLMs will be the complete death of it.
The "Semantic Web" is not the idea that the web contains "semantics" and someday we'll have access to them. That the web has information on it is not the solution statement, it's the problem statement. The semantic web is the idea that all this information on the web will be organized, by the owners of the information, voluntarily, and correctly, into a big cross-site Knowledge Graph that can be queried by anybody. To the point that visiting Wikipedia behind the scenes would not be a big chunk of formatted text, but a download of "facts" embedded in tuples in RDF and the screen you read as a human a rendered result of that, where Wikipedia doesn't just use self-hosted data but could grab "the Knowledge Graph" and directly embed other RDF information from the US government or companies or universities. Compare this dream to reality and you can see it doesn't even resemble reality.
Nobody was sitting around twenty years ago going "oh, wow, if we really work at this for 20 years some people might annotate their web blogs with their author and people might be able to write bespoke code to query it, sometimes, if we achieve this it will have all been worth it". The idea is precisely that such an act would be so mundane as to not be something you would think of calling out, just as I don't wax poetic about the tag in HTML being something that changes the world every day. That it would not be something "possible" but that it would be something your browser is automatically doing behind the scenes, along with the other vast amount of RDF-driven stuff it is constantly doing for you all the time. The very fact that someone thinks something so trivial is worth calling out is proof that the idea has utterly failed.