Douglas B. Lenat
Abstract
Since 1984, a person-century of effort has gone into building CYC, a universal schema of roughly 105 general concepts spanning human reality. Most of the time has been spent codifying knowledge about these concepts; approximately 106 commonsense axioms have been handcrafted for and entered into CYC's knowledge base, and millions more have been inferred and cached by CYC. This article examines the fundamental assumptions of doing such a large-scale project, reviews the technical lessons learned by the developers, and surveys the range of applications that are or soon will be enabled by the technology.
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Digital Library
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Index Terms
- CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure
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Reviews
Giuseppina Carla Gini
The CYC project was established in 1984 as a ten-year project aimed at building a generic knowledge-based system expressing commonsense knowledge as used in almost all aspects of everyday life. The long development time of this project is peculiar, because the applications of the system have just started to appear, and it is still questionable whether they will significantly benefit from the whole system. This paper presents the status of the implementation and the first trials of using the system for applications. The technical description notes that the developers had to change their minds more than once in order to be able to express, as rapidly as possible, general concepts that are now ready. Applications are indicated in creating a user model for Mosaic pages, in better uses of word processors, in extending the functionality of email, and so on. This appears to be the largest knowledge base so far built, with orders of magnitude larg<__?__Pub Caret>er than any other. Is CYC necessary__?__ The author recognizes that it is impossible to answer that question now.
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