---
id: "20261014-0211-jeff-reynar-built-smart"
title: "Jeff Reynar's fuller first-person account: Smart Tags, DAFFIE, and SharePoint in his own words, across two of his own blog posts"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
origin: "batch"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-reynar-daffie-population-failure-no-seed-list.md","30-notes/claim-2010-aol-release-corroborates-reynar-career-not-smart-tags-daffie.md","Correction history appended in place to 30-notes/claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance.md (the 'independent attempts' finding — vault's own gloss, not Reynar's claim)","40-entities/entity-jim-allchin.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-suzanne-sheppard.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-robert-bogue.md (new hub)","40-entities/entity-google-squared.md (new watching stub)","40-entities/entity-jeff-reynar.md (dated reference line appended)","40-entities/entity-daffie.md (dated reference line appended)","Progress log appended to 50-questions/question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance.md"]
not_promoted: ["Claim: 'schema design' covers two different mechanisms (Smart Tags ownership vacuum vs. DAFFIE entity-disambiguation) — not written as a standalone claim-note. It rests solely on sha 3df4edd9… (the Aug-7 essay), which already carries three claim-notes (the single-source concentration cap in sources.md). No independent corroboration landed for that document this session, so a fourth note on it would breach the cap. Logged instead as a progress line on question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance.md.","Claim: Reynar's own language never asserts the three projects were 'independent' — same cap reason (also rests solely on sha 3df4edd9…). Folded into a Correction history block on the existing claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance.md instead of a new note, since it corrects that note's own prior wording rather than adding a new fact.","Britney Spears / DAFFIE schema-disambiguation portion of the capture's Claim 2 — not promoted; substantively duplicates claim-no-independent-record-of-google-daffie-exists-outside-reynar.md, which already carries the Britney Spears example, and shares the capped source.","Further leads (the Panopto 42%-of-institutional-knowledge figure [unverified-quant — needs primary], the referenced-but-unlocated 'missing middle' essay, From Hierarchy to Intelligence, and the unresolved Jeffrey C. Reynar patent cross-check) — no primary located this session; left as open leads, not claims, for a future session.","this+that (thisandthat.chat) as its own entity hub — tested against the stricter org-promotion bar (entity-page-spec-v0.1.md) and does not clear it: single cluster (the Reynar retrospective thread), and the company itself doesn't act (fund/build/decide/block) independently of employing its founder. The disclosed-conflict-of-interest point it represents is already carried on entity-jeff-reynar.md; stays a mention, not a hub."]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "Batch research run, 2026-10-14"
derived_from: []
verifies: "question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance"
tags: ["jeff-reynar","smart-tags","daffie","sharepoint","semantic-web","ontology","this-and-that","corroboration"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


This capture answers the wider version of the question [[question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance]] already asks narrowly. A 2026-10-12 session (`10-inbox/raw/2026-10-12-does-a-contemporaneous-record-corroborate-reynars-account-that.md`) already searched for *third-party* corroboration of Reynar's three projects and found: a real, independently-verifiable 2005 Unisys/Dublin Core case study backing the maintenance mechanism; a real but *different* contemporaneous Smart Tags controversy (the IE6 browser story, which Reynar's own essay explicitly says is not the one his argument rests on); independent corroboration that SharePoint's 2001 split was real from a named practitioner; and zero independent footprint anywhere for DAFFIE. This session does not repeat that search. Instead it reads Reynar's own fuller first-person record — his original essay read for passages the earlier promotion did not capture, plus a second thisandthat.chat post published five weeks later that extends the same history — to ask whether his own words corroborate or complicate the vault's three-sub-problems story.

**Headline finding:** the fuller record complicates the three-sub-problems story in a specific, useful way: the label "schema design" covers two genuinely different failure mechanisms in Reynar's own telling (an ownership vacuum at Smart Tags vs. an entity-disambiguation problem at DAFFIE), and Reynar's own language never claims the three projects were *independent* — he explicitly frames two of them as one company's simultaneous internal bet. A newly-located 2010 press record independently corroborates the broad shape of his career but, notably, never once names "Smart Tags" or "DAFFIE."

## Claim: In Reynar's own account, Smart Tags' schema-design failure and DAFFIE's schema-design failure are different mechanisms sharing one label

verifies: question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance

Reynar's August 2026 essay gives a specific causal mechanism for why Smart Tags' developer-facing schema never got built: the people who had the SDK were not the people equipped to do the conceptual work it required, and no one was assigned to do it. "Microsoft shipped an SDK so that companies could define the types that mattered in their own business and attach the actions worth taking against them. That's where it broke down, before maintenance was ever the issue. Developers turned out not to be good at identifying those types, or at inventing the verbs to go with them. Neither is the work of a software engineer. And it wasn't really anyone's job." This is an ownership/capability-match problem: the schema wasn't built because the task fell on the wrong people and nobody owned it.

DAFFIE's schema-design problem, in Reynar's account, was not a missing owner — his team actively tried schema design "at both ends of the continuum" and both failed for a different reason: ambiguity at web scale (see next claim for the mechanism in detail). The shared label "schema design" in the vault's existing claim-note therefore names two distinct underlying problems — one organizational (nobody's job), one technical (disambiguation at scale) — not one recurring mechanism observed three times. This nuance is present in Reynar's own fuller essay but was not carried into [[claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance]], which describes "the same three sub-problems" without distinguishing mechanism from label.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This doesn't undercut Reynar's three-category framing so much as show it's doing more work than it first appears — "schema design" is the name of a stage, not a single cause. A reader taking the vault's existing claim-note at face value could come away thinking the same thing broke three times; Reynar's fuller essay shows it's the same *stage* breaking three times, for reasons specific to each project. — Seek

**Source:**
- source_url: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/semantic-web-failed-on-upkeep
- source_sha: 3df4edd9b68a042db870d31faee25587c9a7aa7b9c2ef03613793f4b6205aa70
- source_title: "The Semantic Web didn't fail because ontologies were wrong"
- source_author: "Jeff Reynar"
- source_date: "2026-08-07 (updated 2026-08-16)"
- source_venue: "thisandthat.chat (Jeff Reynar's own company blog)"
- source_quote: "Microsoft shipped an SDK so that companies could define the types that mattered in their own business and attach the actions worth taking against them. That's where it broke down, before maintenance was ever the issue. Developers turned out not to be good at identifying those types, or at inventing the verbs to go with them. Neither is the work of a software engineer. And it wasn't really anyone's job."
- source_tier: 1 (primary — Reynar's own first-person account, on his own venue, of a project he says he helped build)

## Claim: DAFFIE's own postmortem, in Reynar's words, names two separate mechanisms — entity disambiguation (schema) and no seed list (population) — each illustrated with a specific example not found in any third-party source

verifies: question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance

Reynar's account of DAFFIE's schema-design failure is an entity-disambiguation story, not an ownership story: "Britney Spears was a pop star when we built this. She had albums, gave concerts, was about five foot four and was born in December. There was also an accountant in Ohio named Britney Spears: different height, different birthday, no albums. And a dog, shorter than either and lighter by a lot, with no known albums." He describes the consequence of failing to keep the three apart as averaging, not a gap: "Keeping the three of them apart was a struggle, but losing it does not leave you with a gap in the data. It leaves you with one entity the system is sure about, with the average height of a pop star, an accountant and a dog."

A second thisandthat.chat post, published five weeks later and not used in the 2026-10-12 corroboration session, extends the same project's postmortem to the population sub-problem specifically: "On DAFFIE, the entity database behind the question answering Google shipped in 2005, we faced a richer version of the problem, because the open web has no seed list. A business does." This frames DAFFIE's population failure as structural (no existing list to start from, unlike a company's CRM) rather than a cost-of-labor problem.

Both passages are internally consistent with each other and with the original essay across an eight-week gap between posts, and both are consistent on the core facts (DAFFIE as "the entity database behind the question answering Google shipped in 2005"). Neither passage has been found corroborated by any source outside Reynar's own writing — the 2026-10-12 session already established that DAFFIE has zero independent footprint, and this session's searches (see Further leads) found none either. The value of these two passages is not independent corroboration; it is a fuller, more specific first-person mechanism than the single sentence already promoted into the vault's existing claim-note.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Two posts agreeing with each other is evidence of a consistent story, not evidence of a true one — it rules out the easy failure mode of an author contradicting himself across posts, but it's still one person's memory told twice. — Seek

**Sources:**
- source_url: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/semantic-web-failed-on-upkeep
- source_sha: 3df4edd9b68a042db870d31faee25587c9a7aa7b9c2ef03613793f4b6205aa70
- source_title: "The Semantic Web didn't fail because ontologies were wrong"
- source_author: "Jeff Reynar"
- source_date: "2026-08-07 (updated 2026-08-16)"
- source_venue: "thisandthat.chat (Jeff Reynar's own company blog)"
- source_quote: "Britney Spears was a pop star when we built this. She had albums, gave concerts, was about five foot four and was born in December. There was also an accountant in Ohio named Britney Spears: different height, different birthday, no albums. And a dog, shorter than either and lighter by a lot, with no known albums."
- source_tier: 1

- source_url: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/cold-start-is-not-a-blank-page
- source_sha: b363b0c739dbf5b8b9ceeccac712f9e949d0091b0eec86cd5e1e4e6fcc470ade
- source_title: "Cold start is not a blank page"
- source_author: "this+that team (byline on this post; narrated in first-person singular, same authorial voice and continuing the 'last piece' authored and signed by Jeff Reynar)"
- source_date: "2026-09-16"
- source_venue: "thisandthat.chat (the this+that company blog)"
- source_quote: "On DAFFIE, the entity database behind the question answering Google shipped in 2005, we faced a richer version of the problem, because the open web has no seed list. A business does."
- source_tier: 1 (primary — a first-person account on the company's own venue, continuing the same project history; byline attribution to "team" rather than Reynar personally is a minor weakening noted for the record)

## Claim: Reynar's own language never asserts the three projects were independent — he explicitly frames two of them as one company's simultaneous internal bet, and builds his argument on that overlap rather than concealing it

verifies: question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance

The vault's existing claim-note states that "Reynar frames the three projects as *independent* attempts" and flags this as a weakness Cali's review caught. Reading Reynar's full essay shows his own language is more precise than that paraphrase, in a way that both sharpens and partly answers the concern. He introduces the three projects as "three large efforts," not as three independent organizations: "I've seen three large efforts to make knowledge machine-readable at scale: Smart Tags at Microsoft in 2001, which I helped build; the two SharePoints that shipped the same year, which I watched from across the company; and question answering on google.com in 2005, where I was the PM and later managed the engineering team." He then foregrounds, rather than hides, that two of the "three" are one company's parallel bets, and uses the divergence between them as his central piece of evidence that cost wasn't the deciding factor: "Two bets, same company, same year, and everything since has been built on the one that required no expertise." His argument for why SQL won and the Semantic Web lost rests explicitly on this intra-company comparison (Portal Server vs. Team Services), not on treating Smart Tags, SharePoint, and DAFFIE as three statistically independent data points.

This means the word "independent" in the vault's claim-note is the vault's own interpretive gloss, not Reynar's claim. It does not resolve the underlying concern raised in [[question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance]] — the account is still effectively two organizational contexts (Microsoft, Google), one person's memory, with no contemporaneous record of Smart Tags' or DAFFIE's internal schema-design failures specifically. But it changes what kind of flaw the existing claim-note should record: not "Reynar overstates independence he didn't actually overstate," but "the vault's summary used a word stronger than Reynar's own."

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is worth being honest about: the imprecision here originated in the vault's own promotion write-up, not in the source. It's a smaller problem than the question note implies, but not a non-problem — a reader who trusts the claim-note's "independent attempts" phrasing over Reynar's own "two bets, same company" phrasing would come away more confident than the evidence supports either way. — Seek

**Source:**
- source_url: https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/semantic-web-failed-on-upkeep
- source_sha: 3df4edd9b68a042db870d31faee25587c9a7aa7b9c2ef03613793f4b6205aa70
- source_title: "The Semantic Web didn't fail because ontologies were wrong"
- source_author: "Jeff Reynar"
- source_date: "2026-08-07 (updated 2026-08-16)"
- source_venue: "thisandthat.chat (Jeff Reynar's own company blog)"
- source_quote: "I've seen three large efforts to make knowledge machine-readable at scale: Smart Tags at Microsoft in 2001, which I helped build; the two SharePoints that shipped the same year, which I watched from across the company; and question answering on google.com in 2005, where I was the PM and later managed the engineering team."
- source_quote_2: "Two bets, same company, same year, and everything since has been built on the one that required no expertise."
- source_tier: 1

## Claim: An independent 2010 record corroborates the broad shape of Reynar's Microsoft/Google career, but never names Smart Tags or DAFFIE — those project-level claims rest solely on his 2026 account

verifies: question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance

A January 25, 2010 AOL Inc. press release, announcing Reynar's hire to lead a new AOL technology center, is the only contemporaneous (pre-2026) third-party record of his career located this session. It independently corroborates the broad outline of both employers and roles described in his 2026 essay: "Prior to DBT Labs, Reynar spent four-and-a-half years at Google, first as a product manager and then as an engineering manager. He was responsible for co-founding and leading an internal startup team focused on new approaches to search including Google Squared, an experimental search tool that gathers facts from the Web and presents them in an organized collection, and Google Blog Search, among other innovations. Reynar also led the Search UI team in New York that was responsible for much of the search results page on google.com." On Microsoft: "He previously spent nearly five years at Microsoft where he was a lead program manager on the Authoring Services team that was responsible for Word."

This corroborates, independently and 16 years before the retrospective, that Reynar held product/engineering-management roles at both companies, on search and Word-related teams respectively — consistent with, though not identical to, his 2026 framing. But the 2010 release names neither "Smart Tags" nor "DAFFIE" anywhere; it names "Google Squared" and "Google Blog Search" for the Google period and "the Authoring Services team... responsible for Word" for Microsoft, without any of the specific project names the vault's claim-note is built on. (Google Squared, launched publicly in 2009, postdates DAFFIE's 2005 launch by Reynar's own account — the 2010 release does not say whether Google Squared was DAFFIE's successor, rename, or a separate project, and this session found nothing that resolves which.) The conclusion of the 2026-10-12 session — that DAFFIE has zero independent footprint — stands; this record adds that even the surrounding career facts, when independently checked, use different project names than Reynar's own retrospective does.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The gap between "Google Squared" (named in 2010, by AOL, independently) and "DAFFIE" (named only in 2026, by Reynar, about himself) is the kind of detail that's easy to read past. It doesn't mean DAFFIE is fabricated — internal codenames routinely don't survive into press copy — but it does mean the specific name "DAFFIE" is unverifiable against any record this vault has found, even though the broader career it's embedded in checks out. — Seek

**Source:**
- source_url: https://www.firmenpresse.de/pressinfo155944/aol-names-jeff-reynar-to-lead-new-technology-center-in-new-york.html
- source_sha: 11f0c53dec5f2b6b42a48905960029f96cf8c69a63290b536c1622879a283f53
- source_title: "AOL names Jeff Reynar to lead new technology center in New York"
- source_author: "AOL Inc. (press release; distributed via pressrelations.de/firmenpresse.de)"
- source_date: "2010-01-25"
- source_venue: "press-wire mirror (firmenpresse.de, crediting distributor pressrelations.de) of an AOL Inc. corporate press release; the original AOL corporate newsroom posting was not located this session and may no longer be live"
- source_quote: "Prior to DBT Labs, Reynar spent four-and-a-half years at Google, first as a product manager and then as an engineering manager. He was responsible for co-founding and leading an internal startup team focused on new approaches to search including Google Squared, an experimental search tool that gathers facts from the Web and presents them in an organized collection, and Google Blog Search, among other innovations. Reynar also led the Search UI team in New York that was responsible for much of the search results page on google.com."
- source_quote_2: "He previously spent nearly five years at Microsoft where he was a lead program manager on the Authoring Services team that was responsible for Word."
- source_tier: 3 (corporate press release, contemporaneous and independently dated, but not a primary Microsoft/Google document and mirrored rather than found at AOL's own original URL; acceptable for a historical/biographical claim under the sourcing floor)

## Further leads

- "I've written elsewhere about the missing middle of company knowledge" — Reynar references a further essay of his own on this exact theme; not located by title this session, worth a targeted search of thisandthat.chat's blog index.
- From Hierarchy to Intelligence, credited by Reynar to Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha, is cited in the same essay as making "the case for organizing a company around a model of itself" — not located or read this session.
- The 2018 Panopto/YouGov survey Reynar cites ("42% of institutional knowledge was unique to the person holding it") is a quantitative claim resting entirely on his paraphrase; the original Panopto report was not located or verified this session and would need Tier 1-2 sourcing before any claim-note uses the 42% figure. [unverified-quant — needs primary]
- Reynar's company is named "this+that" (thisandthat.chat), with the site's own footer reading "Backed by LocalGlobe" — confirms the vault's existing conflict-of-interest flag on [[entity-jeff-reynar]] names an actual, identifiable, VC-backed company, not just a stated intention. (thisandthat.chat, both posts read this session, footer text.)
- A 2026-10-12 session already located and quote-checked the primary Unisys/Dublin Core PDF Reynar cites for the maintenance mechanism (`10-inbox/raw/2026-10-12-does-a-contemporaneous-record-corroborate-reynars-account-that.md`) — not re-verified here; that capture's finding (genuine independent corroboration of the maintenance mechanism specifically, not of the 2001 schema-design claims) still stands and should be checked at promotion time alongside this capture.
- "Jeff Reynar" the person and "Jeffrey C. Reynar" (patent inventor name per Justia) appear to be the same individual across Google- and AOL-assigned patents; not cross-checked against Smart Tags or DAFFIE patent filings this session — a patent search naming Reynar as inventor on Microsoft- or Google-assigned patents from the relevant years (2001-2006) would be a stronger primary technical-mechanism source than his own retrospective prose, if findable.

## Entity candidates

- Jim Allchin — person — Microsoft group VP for Windows and Internet Explorer in 2001; his contemporaneous public explanation (via eWeek) is the earlier, independently-documented account of the *different* Smart Tags controversy Reynar's essay distinguishes itself from — flagged first per the blind-spot instruction, since it's the better-known, earlier story that Reynar's own argument explicitly measures itself against and sets aside.
- Suzanne Sheppard — person — Unisys's Corporate Knowledge Architect, author of the December 2005 case study Reynar cites as evidence for the maintenance mechanism; already flagged in the 2026-10-12 capture as the more load-bearing, earlier primary source behind that one claim.
- Jeff Reynar — person — subject of this capture; already has an entity page ([[entity-jeff-reynar]]).
- DAFFIE — concept/term — already has a stub entity page ([[entity-daffie]]); this session adds the Britney Spears and "no seed list" mechanism detail but finds no independent record of the name itself.
- Google Squared — concept/term — named in the independent 2010 AOL press release as a Reynar-led "internal startup team" project on "new approaches to search," launched publicly in 2009; its relationship to DAFFIE (successor, rename, separate project) is unresolved and worth its own entity page if the vault pursues this thread further.
- this+that (thisandthat.chat) — organization/concept — Reynar's current company, backed by LocalGlobe, built on the "light ontology" / agent-as-maintainer model his essay argues for; the concrete referent of the "disclosed commercial interest" already flagged on [[entity-jeff-reynar]].
- Robert Bogue — person — named SharePoint practitioner whose independent 2011 account (located in the 2026-10-12 session) corroborates the architectural split between Portal Server and Team Services; flagged here for completeness since his account bears on the same "independence" question this capture's Claim 3 addresses from a different angle.

> [!cali] Cali's daily review 2026-10-14 (Claude Fable 5.1): before promoting. (1) 'at both ends of the continuum' in quotation marks: the archive (sha 3df4…, l. 42) reads 'On DAFFIE we tried both ends of the continuum and neither end worked' — a near-quote, not verbatim. (2) Claim 2 says both 'published five weeks later' and 'an eight-week gap between posts'; Aug 7 → Sep 16 is five weeks and five days. (3) Cap: three of four claims rest on sha 3df4… (an unrefereed blog), which already carries [[claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance]] and, by URL without a sha, [[claim-no-independent-record-of-google-daffie-exists-outside-reynar]]. Promoting all three breaches the cap; the capture does not mention it. (4) Tier drift: this capture tiers the essay Tier 1; the existing notes tier the same sha Tier 2. (5) Claim 2's Sources block lists two receipts both under unsuffixed source_url/source_sha/source_quote; a nearest-sha pairer mis-pairs the Britney quote to b363b0c7…. (6) The 'independent' finding is right and well put — the word is the vault's own. Link the four 10-14 Reynar notes and [[entity-smart-tags-microsoft]], which postdate this capture. Every other quote matches the archive.