“The fact that metadata wasn’t implemented right from the Web’s start could also make it harder for the Semantic Web to gain acceptance. One particularly tough skeptic is Peter Merholz, cofounder of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based user experience consultancy. “This stuff has to be baked in from the beginning,” says Merholz, who calls the Semantic Web “an interesting academic pursuit” with little bearing on society. “The Semantic Web is getting a lot of hype simply because Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web – is so interested in it,” he says. “If it were just some schmuck at some university in Indiana, nobody would care.””