OpenCyc Formalized Common Knowledge

ruby-talk
1

Has anyone taken a look at the OpenCyc project? Here’s an overview I
snipped from their website:

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.

This project seems to hold a great deal of promise, imho, as teaching
a computer “common sense” seems to be the first step in a number of
applications. The project is still in it’s infancy but they have
released a first version of the database/application. Unfortunately
the interface is entirely JAVA-based at the moment although there are
plans to support other languages.

From reading their messageboards it seems more people are confused
than inspired by this project so i’m hoping an influx of ruby
programmers might get the ball rolling for some type of ruby-based
interface!

This is the documentation webpage: http://www.opencyc.org/doc

This is the OpenCyc messageboard:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=85727

2

There is A LOT of java code that backs this OpenCyc project (see CVS).
It’s basically a full implementation of a constraint-based expert system
engine to process their ontology. Its very cool, and I’ve thought for a
while that doing this stuff in Ruby would whip Java’s ass…but then I
am biased :wink: I think this code is being open-sourced because Cycorp is
being partially funded through a couple of DARPA projects and they are
demanding open-source.

The first thing to do would be to separate what you need to get a core
up and running from the DARPA project specific stuff. If you do that
(and develop a list of Java class’s functionality that would have to be
ported to Ruby) please post your findings here (or to me personally if
none other are interested)

Best Regards,

-rich

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Benik [mailto:jobeicus@hotmail.com]
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2002 10:51 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: OpenCyc Formalized Common Knowledge

Has anyone taken a look at the OpenCyc project? Here’s an
overview I snipped from their website:

OpenCycT is the open source version of the CycR 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 ResearchCycT (available for R&D in academia
and industry) and then OpenCyc.

This project seems to hold a great deal of promise, imho, as
teaching a computer “common sense” seems to be the first step
in a number of applications. The project is still in it’s
infancy but they have released a first version of the
database/application. Unfortunately the interface is
entirely JAVA-based at the moment although there are plans to
support other languages.

From reading their messageboards it seems more people are
confused than inspired by this project so i’m hoping an
influx of ruby programmers might get the ball rolling for
some type of ruby-based interface!

This is the documentation webpage: http://www.opencyc.org/doc

This is the OpenCyc messageboard:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?> forum_id=85727