Phil Henshaw wrote:
> I'll have to try OpenCyc to have any clear idea what it's for. What's
> the productive question it asks?
>
>From http://www.cyc.com/cyc/technology/whatiscyc_dir/whatsincyc
The Cyc knowledge base (KB) is a formalized representation of a vast
quantity of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and
heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of everyday life.
The medium of representation is the formal language CycL, described
below. The KB consists of terms--which constitute the vocabulary of
CycL--and assertions which relate those terms. These assertions include
both simple ground assertions and rules.
..
The Cyc KB is divided into many (currently thousands of)
"microtheories", each of which is essentially a bundle of assertions
that share a common set of assumptions; some microtheories are focused
on a particular domain of knowledge, a particular level of detail, a
particular interval in time, etc. The microtheory mechanism allows Cyc
to independently maintain assertions which are prima facie
contradictory, and enhances the performance of the Cyc system by
focusing the inferencing process.
..
Natural-language (NL) processing is among the most studied -- and most
intractable -- outstanding challenges of software engineering. Many
teams have attempted to produce NL systems capable of reading and making
sense of plain english text, but none have succeeded to any significant
degree outside of narrow, pre-conceived domains. As shown in the
examples below, Cyc-like common sense is a prerequisite for human-level
competence at this task.
Consider the following pair of sentences:
* Fred saw the plane flying over Zurich.
* Fred saw the mountains flying over Zurich.
Although the sentences are very similar, humans have little difficulty
in recognizing that in the first sentence, "flying" probably refers to
the plane, while in the second sentence, "flying" almost certainly
refers to Fred.
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