> "Nobody understood it."

I don't think the semantic web is hard to understand. The semantic web is a distributed database that everyone can contribute to and access. It allows you to write queries to explore the data on the web, rather than having to browse through it.

For those that are new to the idea of the semantic web, DBpedia is a decent example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia

The BBC website also makes use of semantic web technologies:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/technology/software-engineering...