People get alarmed by the prospect of robots doing various things to them, so let me explain this in slightly greater detail.
The goal of semantic content is not merely to draw a line between natural language content and the factual data it represents. It wants to do that, yes, and it's a noble aspiration. Its secret agenda is to turn that data into structured information that can be included in programs that actually DO things.
For instance, if my directory of meaning includes the sematic values for tables of data for weird things like pounds of shrimp reported at boat landings in South Carolina during shrimping season, and I can know all the important facts about how that data was collected, then I can write scripts that compare that data to other data tables in other directories of meaning.
Stich together a web of meaning, with interoperable standards and technologies, and there's no telling what patterns we'll discover, hidden within the formerly disconnected strands.
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