Abstract. Watson is a gateway to the Semantic Web: it collects, analyzes and gives access to ontologies and semantic data available online with the objective of supporting their dynamic exploitation by semantic applications. We report on the analysis of 25 500 ontologies and semantic documents collected by Watson, giving an account about the way semantic technologies are used to publish knowledge on the Web, about the characteristics of the published knowledge, and about the networked aspects of the Semantic Web. Our main conclusions are 1- that the Semantic Web is characterized by a large number of small, lightweight ontologies and a small number of large-scale, heavyweight ontologies, and 2- that important efforts still need to be spent on improving the published ontologies (coverage of different topic domains, connectedness of the semantic data, etc.) and the tools that produce and manipulate them.