Semantic Web investing - smart move or just a load of bankers?

A bunch of bankers have invested in MetaWeb, the company building FreeBase, to the tune of $42m. From the article in Innonate (tip of hat to PaidContent for link)

This shows a very serious investment in the semantic web… but instead of a distributed semantic web, which is a strictly top-down or bottom-up semantic web, it seems to be an investment in the private, centralized semantic web (and a strange mix of top-down and bottom-up, adding in the proprietary nature of it).

Actually, this doesn't surprise me - solving the general case of the Semantic Web is just too big a task today, in our view, so closing it down to a manageable subset is the only viable way of starting to build Semantic Web technology. Making it proprietary arguably simplifiess the design and build of the technology, but it also signals that they wish to extract value early. I also suspect this makes them far more attractive to any backers who are putting in large wads of cash.

Innonate also notes that:

With an API out there, it may be that Freebase is expecting to GET more information from third-party developers than they GIVE. And with a $42 million bounty over their heads now, you know Freebase is going to be trying to GET a lot.

And they will have to pay handsomely for it, as right now they leave little motivation for altruistic / open source development from 3rd parties. It's the classic "Old Economy" software model, lets see if they can get it done fast enough or whether the open source guys will get accessible services out earlier. They have an advantage in that they are structuring data that is already frequently behind paywalls and thus inaccessible to public / open model services, but that world is also changing.