Brian Sletten has long been passionate about the semantic web, and I was fortunate enough to catch up with him at UberConf 2015 in Denver, Colorado. We talk about why the early promise of the semantic web didn't materialise at the time (and why it now may be coming into it's own), why XML may be a terrible way to view graphs, and even touch on the problems with encryption.

You can follow Brian on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/bsletten

And see some of his previous talks: http://nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/speaker/brian_sletten

You can also read up on JSON-LD here: http://json-ld.org/

Finally, Brian has a bunch of reading & presentations out there if you're interested in exploring some of his ideas on the semantic web further:

Caring Doesn't Scale - https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/caring-doesnt-scale

A Webinar on JSON-LD - http://www.dataversity.net/smartdata-webinar-json-ld/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_rdf/

And a series of articles on using RDF and associated technology to create webs of data - https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_sparql/,

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale_linked-data/index.html, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-OSLC-and-the-linked-data-platform/index.html and

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-data-integration-at-scale-oslc/index.html