Related link: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/06/09/deviant.html
Don’t get me wrong. I adore the ideals of the Semantic Web. But I also share Cory Doctorow’s well articulated trepidation about anything that’s predicated on humans being honest and reliable on the scale required by the Semantic Web.
It’s not that I distrust people. I just know that people are, well, people.
Can the Semantic Web overcome human nature?
Semantic web better suited to "closed" specialised communities?
Your and Cory Doctorow's sceptism re the practical value of the semantic web might well apply to the broad consumer market, I'd consider that the semantic web may have very good value for comparatively "closed" communities, as long as they can shut out the porn/get-rich-quick/etc vendors.
I'm thinking of bioinformatics, but I'm sure other specialist areas would say the same thing. Scientific publishers might be another.
The people within these commnities are motivated in a generally very ethnical way just from the nature of the venture.
You'd still need a means to keep outsiders with other motivations from pirating the scheme(s) for their own use. The obscurity of these communities probably goes some way towards this, but "junk mail" services rarely cares about that.
Focusing on these communities and how to prevent outsiders from exploiting a meta data schema might be a more useful place for the semantic web folks to start than the general commercial environment -- ?