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.