Semantic functionality is indeed the important distinction of the original Web 3.0 idea, but a web of independent databases that contain different states from each other is much richer than a web of the same database distributed across a network. Database technology is key to moving in the right direction and blockchains are an innovation in the space and the ability to query information in them based on certain relationships is improving, but they are limited in their global scope.

It is encouraging that people are starting to utilize information in these database and organize these databases in interesting ways to run applications, but at the same time, because of the lack of diversity between databases, I feel that the potential and promise of a semantic web isn't quite there yet. As the way applications run now, there is still a central application running from a single computer or a few computers, as opposed all machines accessing data as running application functions that allow some degree of flexibility depending on the user or the underlying data being queried from the database(s).

That flexibility I feel is the biggest promise of semantic technologies, we got a taste of it in early Web2.0, but it was phased out because uniformity is more efficient and cost-effective.