Why do we call it ‘The Semantic Web? The web is nothing but a collection of electronic files. Where is the “semantic” in those files? (Even with linking, same question.)
Where was the “semantic” in Egyptian hieroglyphic texts? They had one semantic in the view of Horapollo, Atahanasius Kircher, and others. They have a different semantic in the view of later researchers, Jean-François_Champollion and see the Wikipedia article Egyptian Hieroglyphics.
Same text, different semantics. With the later ones viewed as being “correct.” Yet it would be essential to record the hieroglyphic semantics of Kircher to understand the discussions of his contemporaries and those who relied on his work. One text, multiple semantics.
All our search, reasoning, etc., engines can do is to mechanically apply patterns and return content to us. The returned content has no known “semantic” until we assign it one. Different users may supply different semantics to the same content.
Perhaps a better name would be “The Matching Web (semantics supplied by users)”.*
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*Then we could focus on managing the semantics supplied by users. A different task than the one underway in the “Semantic Web” at present.