A Survey of the First 20 Years of Research on Semantic Web and Linked Data
2018 paper by Fabien Gandon
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01935898/document
Daniel Mahal pointed out this quote from p. 40. My emphasis.
‘There is also a growing concern of the cost of the Web in terms of energy, infrastructure and resources in general and of who can afford that cost. The questions of identifying the “Web we want” and the “Web we can afford” can be specialized to the case of the semantic Web and translated into research challenges such as designing and optimizing the architectures and processes to improve our impact on society, environment and the world in general. For instance, the actual need to re-decentralize the Web and give everybody his Web site back again, translates into research questions for the semantic Web to find new architectures and methods supporting this re-empowerment of the Web users. For many years now, I have been concluding my talks insisting on the fact that “He who controls metadata controls the Web and, through the Web, many things of our world”. A corollary of that saying is that we must ensure, by every means, especially open research, open development and open standards, that the Web in general and the semantic Web and (linked) data in particular, do not end up being centralized in one silo, one hand. The need for a constructive design of the Web and the semantic Web is at the heart of the agenda of Web Science.’
Semantic web and Energy consumption in digital services