OpenCyc 1.0 Released

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, August 10, 2006 @ 2:24 pm

OpenCyc 1.0 was quietly released today. It doesn't bill itself as a Business Rule Engine. Instead, from the FAQ:

What is OpenCyc?

OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. Cycorp, the builders of Cyc, have set up an independent organization OpenCyc.org, to disseminate and administer OpenCyc, and have committed to a pipeline through which all current and future Cyc technology will flow into ResearchCyc (available for R&D in academia and industry) and then OpenCyc.

What is included with the first release of OpenCyc?

Release 1.0 of OpenCyc will include the following:

• 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.
• A specification of CycL, the language in which Cyc (and hence OpenCyc) is written. There are CycL-to-Lisp, CycL-to-C, etc. translators.
• A specification of the Cyc API, by calling which a programmer can build an OpenCyc application with very little familiarity with CycL or with the OpenCyc KB.
• A few sample programs that demonstrate use of the Cyc API for application development.

According to the docs, the inference engine is not RETE but instead a mix of specialized techniques. Also, said engine is not actually open source but instead distributed under a perpetually free license.

I'm going to reserve comment on the usefulness or quality of the software, but the ontology and the knowledge-base are probably worth some study.

Update 1: There are some comments that give a little bit more texture on Cyc from a IEEE mailing list.

Technorati : cyc, inferencing engine, knowledge base, opencyc

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Comments (2)

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Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Cyc has been in production since about 1985 or so. Dr. Lenat wrote his seminal publication on Cyc in 1989 and predicted that it would be finished in 1995. In 1995 he stretched this out to 2025. Maybe. It is, nore correctly, a KnowledgeBase rather than a RuleBase and contains far, far more informtion that any rulebase would, or could, want to do. Just an thought…

   Comment by James Owen, Saturday, September 30, 2006 @ 10:04 am

2. 

   I’ve read that OpenCyc will handle natural language. Are there plans for conversations at some point?

   Yes. There are plans for OpenCyc to be able to understand and generate natural language. Right now (April 2002) OpenCyc has NL generation, but not parsing. Some of the work for making conversations with OpenCyc possible will come from the OpenCyc community.

   You can easily generate NL with OpenCyc. We have an API gateway — it’s not in the API docs yet — for NL generation.

   Try this in SubL: (generate-phrase #$France)

   OpenCyc will return: France

   Try this in SubL: (generate-phrase #$UnitedStatesOfAmerica)

   OpenCyc will return: the United States

   generate-phrase will also take assertions as arguments.

   Try this in SubL: (generate-phrase ‘(#$isa #$UnitedStatesOfAmerica #$Nation))

   OpenCyc will return: the United States is nation

   OpenCyc speaks Engish but does not understand much English yet. We will give you api calls to our parsers in later releases. Full Cyc already has thousands of idiomatic templates.

   Comment by Bizliner, Wednesday, December 6, 2006 @ 1:20 am

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