Ontology/knowledge-graph maintenance is a decaying three-part process — schema, population, upkeep — not a binary codified/non-codified switch

codificationontologyknowledge-graphsemantic-webtacit-knowledgecross-domain-bridge

The vault's existing codification thread — Polanyi's tacit/codified distinction, Autor's "Polanyi's paradox" (claim-polanyis-paradox-tacit-tasks-resist-automation), the chain-of-thought-as-codified-artifact bridge (claim-a-chain-of-thought-trace-is-codified-so-it-cannot-form-a-tacit-moat), and the shared-hinge observation tying automation to imitation (observation-codification-is-the-shared-hinge-of-automation-and-imitation) — has so far treated codification as roughly binary: knowledge is either written down (codified) or it isn't.

The 2026 "semantic layer" / 2001 Semantic Web case complicates that picture. Shadbolt, Hall & Berners-Lee's 2006 retrospective names ontology development and maintenance cost as a named concern, not development cost alone (claim-shadbolt-hall-berners-lee-2006-name-ontology-maintenance-cost-as-often-quoted-concern). Reynar's account of three historical attempts sharpens this into a specific decomposition — schema design, population, and ongoing maintenance — of which, in his telling, maintenance is "the only one of the three that never ends," and the only one with a credible 2026-era answer (agentic upkeep); schema design and population "are still open" (claim-reynar-three-2001-2005-knowledge-systems-died-on-schema-population-maintenance).

Read together, these suggest codification is not a one-time switch flipped when knowledge is first written down, but a process with an ongoing cost that decays without continued investment — closer to upkeep than to a transcription event. On this reading, the recurring 25-year failure includes the act of codifying — in Reynar's telling the schema and population problems "had already stopped most projects before upkeep became the question" — but the sub-problem that never ends, and the place where (in his words) "the decay starts" whenever a person owns it, is sustaining the codification. This reframes, rather than contradicts, the vault's binary-codification framing: the switch still has to be flipped once, but only the upkeep cost recurs for as long as anyone relies on what was codified.