These days I've been learning a lot about how different scientific fields are trying to move their data over to the Semantic Web in order to "free up data from being stored in isolated silos". I read a lot about how these fields are saying how their efforts are implementing the "visions" of the Semantic Web.

As a learner (and from purely a learning perspective) I was curious to know why, if semantic technology is deemed to be so powerful, the efforts have been around for years but myself and a lot of people I know have never even heard of it until very recently? Also, I don't come across any scholarly articles deeming "oh, our inferencing engine was able to make such and such discovery, which is helping us pave our way to solving...." etc.

It seems that there are genuine efforts across different institutions, fields, and disciplines to shift all their data to a "semantic" format, but what happens after all that's been done? All the ontologies have been created/unified, and then what?