I had the pleasure of visiting with some fine folks at Cycorp in Austin, Texas recently. Cycorp is interesting for many reasons, but chiefly because they have expended more effort developing a deeper model of common world knowledge than any other group on the planet. They are different from current semantic web startups. Unlike Metaweb‘s Freebase, for example, Cycorp is defining the common sense logic of the world, not just populating databases (which is an unjust simplification of what Freebase is doing, but is proportionally fair when comparing their ontological schemata to Cyc’s knowledge). Not only does Cyc have the largest and most practical ontology on earth, they have almost incomprehensible numbers of formulas[1] describing the world. Continue reading “Cyc is more than encyclopedic”
systems that know and understand and think and learn