Which way for the semantic web?

It's interesting to see the way the semantic web is being woven into the fight for Yahoo's future. Amit Kumar seems to be saying that semantic identifiers can unlock the actual meaning of a text and that the semantic web can take Yahoo beyond Google. Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee seems to be moving his vision of the semantic web towards a web of data already in structured databases, whose value is unlocked by SPARQL.

The quality of data in the organisations I know about leaves a lot to be desired, even if they would share it. The idea of Artificial Intelligence is as fanciful as ever. Does no one in the AI field read Roland Barthes, or later Wittgenstein, or as a starting point Clay Shirky?