OK, so the title is pure click bait, but here's the thing. It seems to me that the Semantic Web as classically conceived (RDF/XML, SPARQL, triple stores) has had relatively little impact outside academia, whereas other technologies such as JSON, NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, CouchDB) and graph databases (e.g., Neo4J) have got a lot of developer mindshare. In biodiversity informatics the Semantic Web has been a round for a while.

Following on from Testing the GBIF taxonomy with the graph database Neo4J I've added a more complex test that relies on linking taxa to names. In this case I've picked some legume genera ( Coursetia and Poissonia ) where there have been frequent changes of name.

I've been playing with the graph database Neo4J to investigate aspects of the classification of taxa in GBIF's backbone classification. Neo4J is a graph database, and a number of people in biodiversity informatics have been playing with it. Nicky Nicolson at Kew has a nice presentation using graph databases to handle names Building a names backbone, and the Open Tree of Life project use it in their tree machine.