Yes, but the "web of knowledge" folk were planning (ish) hand-added metadata to allow knowledge extraction by AI programs, with no real incentives or network effect to promote people doing that. Google got microdata (which are semantic annotation, if a lot less complicated than the old schemes) added to websites by saying they would include them in Pagerank calculation.
After doing some hunting, apparently I imagined them saying that. What I did not imagine was that it impacts score in results for their "recipe search" product - and it caused some consternation among the recipe blogging community at the time.
