How hasn't it gone too well? Many, many well known companies outside of the technology space including Fortune 100s and 500s as well as various government agencies are successfully leveraging semantic web technologies for knowledge management. There are many interesting public databases out there being widely used for research that leverage semantic technologies as well. JSON serializations of RDF exist too. See: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-json/index.h...

Public database examples: http://flybase.org/ , http://dbpedia.org/ , http://disease-ontology.org/