Read my article in Semanticweb.com about the significance of 2014 in Semantic Web history.

Google is moving away from hand-made ontologies — they were never a fan of them. From the early days, Google’s philosophy has been biased towards big data over manually constructed knowledge. The end of Freebase, and the rise of Knowledge Vault, are just examples of this bias. However,Schema.org‘s impressive growth and adoption can’t be ignored either, and the jury is still out as to whether decentralized ecosystems can ultimately out-scale more centralized data-mining approaches like Knowledge Vault to reach Semantic Web dominance. Although Freebase is being handed off, it is not necessarily over — it is going into the Wikidata project — which could be an increasingly important repository of open knowledge in the future. The war for the Semantic Web is not over.