Summary
From the 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."
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I'm not sure about their claims, however, the project looks very interesting.
OpenCyc can be used as the basis of a wide variety of intelligent applications such as:
speech understanding
database integration
rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area
email prioritizing, routing, summarization, and annotating to name just a few.
Release 1.0 of OpenCyc will include:
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.
The ability to import and export CycML files.
A few sample programs that demonstrate use of the Cyc API for application development.