One very obvious and big advantage is what is called Linked Open Data. This refers to publicly available sites, controlled by ontologies expressed in RDFS / OWL, adhering to a set of best practises and providing access to everybody using the SPARQL language. Today there are hundreds of these sites, and the number is growing rapidly. There are many interesting ways to take advantage of combinations of the Web of Data.
I was also please to hear that Aldo Gangemi of the Semantic Technology Lab, ISTC-CNR in Rome, is busily researching the combinations of semantics, cognitive science and natural language processing, which I am also very interested in.
I was also very pleased to get to know Beinformed, which is a very interesting dutch company betting their business on semantics. What they do is that they model a companys knowledge as an ontology (using a nice, graphical editor) and then, directly and without much further development activity, builds eg. a case management application. The resulting solution contains all the business rules, the processing workflows as well as the user interface. This a very neat indeed! I have been thinking for years, that somebody ought to develop a more flexible paradigm for development. Many applications require much flexibility, and beinformed's approach certainly address those needs very effectively. Moving development to the level of ontologies is what is necessary to do. Agility at a high level! Good work!
Another good approach is mining eg. social networks and other web data for information. For building ontologies from tags and for many other useful applications, once you start to think about it. Harvesting the Wisdom of the Crowds, so to speak. I will have to keep that in mind.
The bottom line is that semantics have proved their value, have found some good applications and there is much more to come. Semantics is not a solution to everything, but there are many areas, where it is the very best approach.

Tags: Semantic Web, Semantics, BeInformed