Google Base werd voorspeld?

Heel toevallig stuitte ik zojuist op een aardig artikel uit juli 2002 waarin Google Base min of meer werd voorspeld.:

August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

A work of fiction. A Semantic Web scenario. A short feature from a business magazine published in 2009.

...

Google Marketplace Manager

Well, first you need the information. Asking people to simply throw it on a server seemed like chaos - so enter Google Marketplace Manager, a small piece of software for Windows, Unix, and Macintosh (this is before Apple bought Spain and renamed it the Different-thinking Capitalist Republic of Information). The Marketplace Manager, or MM, looked like a regular spreadsheet and allowed you to list information about yourself, what you wanted to sell, what you wanted to buy, and so forth. MM was essentially an “logical statement editor,” disguised as a spreadsheet. People entered their names, addresses, and other relevant information about themselves, then they entered what they were selling, and MM saved RDF-formatted files to the server of their choice - and sent a “ping” to Google which told the search engine to update their index.

When it came out, the MM was a little bit magical. Let's say you wanted to sell a book. You entered “Book” in the category and MM queried the Open Product Taxonomy, then came back and asked you to identify whether it was a hardcover book, softcover, used, new, collectible, and so forth. The Open Product Taxonomy is a structured thesaurus, essentially, of product types, and it's quickly becoming the absolute standard for representing products for sale.

Wat er het komend jaar gaat gebeuren wordt ook voorspeld :)