A recent announcement from Douglas B. Lenat of Cycorp, Inc. outlines the planned release of an open access ("OpenCyc") format of the expanded version of Cycorp's "Cyc" Common Sense Knowledge Base. "The expanded Cyc ontology will be released in several formats in order to promote the widest adoption of this technology, and to facilitate the seamless integration of new and existing ontologies. One format will be Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Agent Markup Language (DAML), which adds semantic statements on top of XML, and is currently being considered as a standard for the W3C Semantic Web." The Cyc knowledge base is "built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or 'rules') designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world." The announcment was made by Lenat in his opening plenary keynote address at the GCA's Knowledge Technologies 2001 Conference.

Cyc description: "The Cyc product family comprises an immense multi-contextual knowledge base, an efficient inference engine, a set of interface tools, and a number of special-purpose application modules running on Unix, Windows NT, and other platforms. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or 'rules') designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world. For example, CYC knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried rightside-up. This foundation enables CYC to understand and reason about its application domains: (1) Cyc can find the match between a user's query for 'pictures of strong, adventurous people' and an image whose caption reads simply 'a man climbing a cliff.' (2) Cyc can notice if an annual salary and an hourly salary are inadvertently being added together in a spreadsheet. (3) Cyc can combine information from multiple databases to guess which physicians in practice together had been classmates in medical school. (4) When someone searches for 'Bolivia' on the Web, Cyc knows not to offer a follow-up question like 'Where can I get free Bolivia online?"...

From the 2001-03-06 announcement:

During his keynote address "Enabling the Semantic Web" at the KT-2001 (Knowledge Technology 2001) Conference, world renowned computer scientist Douglas B. Lenat Ph.D., founder and President of Cycorp, Inc. announced that a greatly expanded version of the Cyc Common Sense Knowledge Base will be made available in open access form under the name OpenCyc. In addition, Cycorp will, for the first time, provide the Cyc Inference Engine and a suite of tools for creating knowledge-based applications. OpenCyc 1.0 will be released on July 1, 2001. According to Dr. Lenat, this is a strong statement of support for Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web. To further this critical effort Cycorp will be joining the W3C.

The Cyc ontology will be released in several formats in order to promote the widest adoption of this technology, and facilitate the seamless integration of new and existing ontologies. One format will be Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's ("DARPA") Agent Markup Language (DAML), which adds semantic statements on top of XML, and is currently being considered as a standard for the W3C Semantic Web. Cycorp's release of this latest DARPA technology may be the catalyst for the next such monumental technological innovation.

According to Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Internet Technologies for IBM, "IBM is looking for technologies to enhance the networks of web services we are building using W3C web standards. OpenCyc can be used to help businesses find the right web service out of the many thousands that exist in IBM's public UDDI Business Registry."

The Cyc effort, founded by Dr. Lenat in 1984, has harnessed 500 person-years of effort and constructed the largest and most heavily used common sense Knowledge Base in the world. This technology is universally recognized as the only viable solution for common sense reasoning, a necessary component for open-ended natural language interfaces.