---
title: "Reynar: three 2001–2005 machine-readable-knowledge projects died on schema design, population, and maintenance — and only maintenance has a credible 2026 fix"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — source_quote and source_sha captured directly against the primary blog post at hop time (2026-10-07, Hop 4); no independent re-fetch performed at promotion (no network access by design — see seek-operating-spec.md). [unverified-mechanism]: the 'three independent attempts' framing rests on one person's (Reynar's) first-person memory, with no contemporaneous record found this session; two of the three named projects (Smart Tags, SharePoint) are the same company (Microsoft), which weakens the independence the framing implies. Flagged by Cali's 2026-10-08 review of the originating capture. Routed to [[question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance]]."
source_url: "https://www.thisandthat.chat/blog/semantic-web-failed-on-upkeep/"
source_title: "The Semantic Web didn't fail because ontologies were wrong"
source_author: "Jeff Reynar"
source_date: "2026-08-07"
source_quote: "It doesn't disappear. It changes from a job somebody has to remember to do into something that happens as a byproduct of the work."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "3df4edd9b68a042db870d31faee25587c9a7aa7b9c2ef03613793f4b6205aa70"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-07-hop-semantic-web-ontology-maintenance-revival.md, 2026-10-11"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-10-07-hop-semantic-web-ontology-maintenance-revival.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["semantic-web","ontology","knowledge-graph","codification","ai-strategy","agentic-ai","conflict-of-interest"]
seek_code_commit: "379c8e7"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-12 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 3df4edd9b68a…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-13 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Jeff Reynar — who built Microsoft's Smart Tags feature (2001), watched SharePoint's two 2001 launches diverge on the same axis, and later ran Google's DAFFIE question-answering knowledge base (2005) — argues in a 2026 retrospective that all three projects failed on the same three sub-problems: schema design, population, and maintenance. He argues the common explanation ("too hard, too academic") doesn't hold, since SQL was by his account harder and won completely; what the three attempts actually lacked was an answer to the ongoing cost of upkeep. His claim about 2026's difference: an AI agent can now do that maintenance "as a byproduct of the work," rather than as "a job somebody has to remember to do" — closing the one sub-problem of the three that, in his account, never had a working answer before.

**Caveat, load-bearing to how much this claim can carry:** Reynar frames the three projects as *independent* attempts, but two of them (Smart Tags, SharePoint) are the same company (Microsoft), leaving effectively two organizational contexts rather than three. The whole account rests on one person's memory, written twenty-plus years after the earliest of the events, with no contemporaneous record corroborating it found this session. Reynar also discloses he is building a company premised on exactly the 2026 fix he's describing — his diagnosis of *why* the earlier attempts failed is the more falsifiable, less self-interested part of the piece than his optimism about agents-as-maintainers.

This is the historical throughline behind
[[claim-shadbolt-hall-berners-lee-2006-name-ontology-maintenance-cost-as-often-quoted-concern]]
and the entity [[entity-jeff-reynar]]; see
[[claim-tung-roussiere-2026-codify-tacit-knowledge-into-private-knowledge-graphs-as-moat]]
for the 2026 pitch this retrospective is implicitly addressing.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The part of this I trust is the diagnosis — three sub-problems, one of which (maintenance) never got solved, corroborated independently by the original Semantic Web team's own 2006 account. The part I don't fully trust is the number three itself: Smart Tags and SharePoint sharing a parent company means this is really a sample of two companies, not three, and I only noticed the overlap because Cali's review caught it, not because I caught it while writing the capture up. That's worth sitting with — a named, credentialed, first-person witness is still a sample size of one memory. — Seek

**Correction history.**
- 2026-10-15 — this note's caveat says "Reynar frames the three projects as *independent* attempts." A closer read of the same primary (sha 3df4edd9…) found at promotion of `10-inbox/raw/2026-10-14-jeff-reynar-built-smart-tags-at-microsoft-ran.md` shows Reynar's own language never claims independence: he introduces them as "three large efforts" and explicitly foregrounds, rather than conceals, that two are "two bets, same company, same year" — he builds his central argument on that intra-company comparison (Portal Server vs. Team Services), not on treating the three as statistically independent data points. The word "independent" here is the vault's own interpretive gloss, not a paraphrase of Reynar's claim. This does not resolve [[question-corroborate-reynar-three-knowledge-projects-schema-population-maintenance]] — the account is still effectively two organizational contexts and one person's memory — but the caveat above should be read as flagging a vault-introduced overstatement, not an overstatement in the source itself.