Edu:CYC ontology

CyC Ontology

The Upper Cyc Ontology was in the 90's a set ofapproximately 3,000 terms capturing the most generalconcepts of human consensus reality as part of the Cyc project. As part of the project, different elements were developed: the Cyc representation language (CycL); the Cyc ontology; the Cyc knowledge base of general common-sense rules and assertions; and 4) the Cyc inference engine. (Source: Lenat, D.B., and Guha, R.V. (1989) Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems; Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project 1st edition, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc. Boston, MA, USA)

The aim was for Cyc to contain enough commonsense knowledge to support natural language understanding capabilities that enable it to read through and assimilate any encyclopedia article. It consisted of a foundation ontology and several domain-specific ontologies (called microtheories and later on collections). It was implemented using CyCL language.(Source: Lenat, D. and Guha R.V. (1990) CYC: A Midterm Report, AI Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 3).

The current Cyc KB version contains more than 2.2 million assertions (facts and rules) describing more than 250,000 terms, including nearly 15,000 predicates. There is an open version, OpenCyc, as a freely available subset of the knowledge base that includes an ontology of 47,000 terms, which are defined and elaborated using 306,000 assertions. (Source: Matuszek, C., Cabral, J., Witbrock, M.J., and DeOliveira, J. (2006) An Introduction to the Syntax and Content of Cyc, AAAI Spring Symposium: Formalizing and Compiling Background Knowledge and Its Applications to Knowledge Representation and Question Answering, pp. 44-49.)