There is an alternate timeline where the semantic web took off and there was wide investment in ontological tooling to ensure that the information in academic papers, websites, and applications was structured and accessible to future processing.

We instead live in a world where all the useful data is trapped inside proprietary formats, and entangled in meaningless prose - a world primed for large language models to come along and hallucinate the data that might contained therein.

@sarahjamielewis There is an alternate timeline where the semantic web took off and black had SEOs had tons of fun spamming the crap out of it with fake entries promoting their products, and then people moved on to better platforms.