HN user
StarDog/Pellet are referred to here for their reasoning capabilities, not their "neo4j except more obtuse" capabilities. Fuseki/HDT aren't reasoners, Virtuoso is a partial reasoner but not complete. Don't know about Oracle, they're certainly not non-proprietary.
I work directly in the life sciences side of it. When the microphone is off, other peoples' interaction with me is basically: "Oh great, we have this data which would be pretty straightforward to store and transmit as JSON, but we have to work with this fucker to turn it into some sort of triple format or something." (Can you tell I don't like my job?)
If you pry beneath the surface the life science ontologies are garbage. Full of subtle errors, disagreement between different ontologies, incorrect changing of namespaces which causes backward incompatibility. You have to have 100% knowledge of the ontology's idiosyncrasies in order to use it with confidence (i.e.: you can't).
Funny you mention StarDog. Semantic web is supposedly this great open data thing that's going to unite the world. Except it's such a miserable community there aren't even any decent non-proprietary tools to satisfactorily fulfill the most basic premises of semantic web, after all these years.
You think if not for semantic web, the dbpedia folks would've just shrugged and said "oh well, if only someone had invented a way for us to share knowledge"?
It's like saying J.K. Rowling couldn't have written Harry Potter if not for Bloomsbury Publishing's in-house style rules.
That's semantic web for you. Dbpedia is a project whose value is 99.9999999999% comprised of its content, 0.00000000001% comprised of semantic web scaffolding, and semantic web comes along and claims full credit for the entire thing.
Due to shitty academic job market, I was forced to take a job part of which could be described as "semantic web evangelist". If you read some incredibly optimistic article about the semantic web and how it solves all life's problems, there's a non-negligible chance that I wrote it.
The semantic web is a colossal waste of time and money. It does more harm than good. Unless you're a savvy PI (probably in a European country) who has used it to lasso a big fat grant from clueless committees who think in terms of buzzwords.
Every successful project which is linked in any way to semantic web, would have been successful without the semantic web.
The only original thing to come out of semantic web, RDF, causes more harm than good. Anyone who has had to deal with encoding sequences in RDF, or any other kind of nontrivial structured data, which is only possible with incredibly asinine "blank node" trickery, either knows this or is deceiving themselves.
Semantic reasoners are either limited to EL ontologies, which defeats the whole purpose of OWL's expressiveness; or else take dozens of gigabytes of RAM to reason over any ontology more complicated than "the pizza ontology". Utterly, thoroughly irrelevant in today's VPS-based world.
The semantic web "community" is about 75% made up of invalid URLs because all these academic geniuses are too busy theorizing about ontologies to realize that all the links into their department webpage are going to stop working when their one-year postdoc expires. Various URL-standardizing services try to address this, unfortunately the number of these services is approximately 1 per semantic web researcher, and in the long run they're no more stable than the department webpages.
The semantic web is a horrific waste of (mostly EU) grant funds that could be used on far more worthy research. The world would be a better place if the whole idea had never been invented.