Zack Rosen blogs about why RDF research sucks and has written a mail to the Simile mailinglist for comments. No comments from me, but a general agreement on his suggestions for a way out:
So what can we do about it?
1. Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementors.
2. Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
3. Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and WordPress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.
Just if you wonder: the quote above with the three ways out of the crisis is a 1:1 copy/paste from Zack Rosen, and I agree very strongly with what he says. Additionally, I could think of any other three bullets towards building the semantic web, but I am too lazy now.
If you cite this article, please also cite the original article here:
http://www.zacker.org/semantic-web-research-isnt-working