Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview - "...the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms. Which is to say, almost nowhere."
The abstract: "This month's essay (there's no way to sugar coat this) is on the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee's vision for a Web of documents that are
well-defined and comprehensible to machines.
The executive summary is that this will not work, because the Semantic Web, as an attempt to rescue the old Artificial Intelligence project,
overestimates the value of deductive logic, and underestimates the difficulties in getting people to agree about meaning.
The non-executive summary is the same sentiment, expanded to 3600 words."