From: hal@finney.org
Date: Thu Jun 21 2001 - 18:52:35 MDT
http://www.opencyc.org/ is up and operating and has more details about
the upcoming release. Unfortunately they include this note:
5/29/2001 - In order to ensure a high-quality release, the first
release of OpenCyc, originally scheduled for July 1, 2001, will be
delayed until late summer 2001. More information will be provided as
it becomes available.
So it looks like it will be a while before there is anything to play
with. They list some potential applications:
. speech understanding
. database integration
. rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area
. email prioritizing, routing, summarization, and annotating
and here is what you will get, in part:
. 6,000 concepts: an upper ontology for all of human consensus reality.
. 60,000 assertions about the 6,000 concepts, interrelating them,
constraining them, in effect (partially) defining them.
. A compiled version of the Cyc Inference Engine and the Cyc Knowledge
Base Browser.
. A suite of "RKF" tools for rapidly extracting knowledge from a domain
expert (e.g., a physician or oil drilling specialist), tools which
operate by carrying on a clarification dialogue with that individual;
hence: tools for answering questions via English dialogue.
. Documentation and self-paced learning materials to help users
achieve a basic- to intermediate-level understanding of the issues
of knowledge representation and application development using Cyc.
I'm not sure how the 6000 concepts and 60000 assertions compare with
the 1.5 million database entries now in the full Cyc system, or the half
million that were there at the time of the 1994 evaluation.
But basically it sounds like a stand-along development toolkit to allow
integrating Cyc's knowledge into applications. It's not a web front-end
to Cyc, it is a tool for building complete programs (which of course could
be web based or anything else). You get a copy of the Cyc knowledge base
(the subset described above) that resides on your own computer, plus the
libraries to access, interpret and modify it.
There is also mention that the Princeton WordNet system will be made
available in some form. This is a dictionary that sorts words into
concepts and apparently has already been tied into Cyc's ontology.
Sounds like this could be very helpful in terms of converting natural
language into the 6,000 terms that OpenCyc understands.
Hal
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