Briefs

Aug 31, 2001.

Cycorp Inc. is planning to release an open-source subset of its Cyc
knowledge base, which will let programmers and developers infuse
common sense into everything from search engines to CRM apps.

Artificial intelligence may be coming soon to an application near
you. In a development that will send programmers and developers
scurrying around searching for potential uses, Cycorp Inc. is planning
to make a portion of its Cyc knowledge base, as well as an
accompanying binary version of its inference engine, available as
open-source technology later this year. That could mean the
introduction in the near future of a modicum of artificial
intelligence in everything from search engines to
customer-relationship management applications.  The initial release of
the OpenCyc knowledge base will offer a small subset of the Cyc
ontology, which has been developed during the past 17 years, first by
an industry consortium and subsequently as a project managed by
Cycorp. OpenCyc product manager John De Oliveira says the work Cycorp
is doing is focused on furthering development of Tim Berners-Lee's
vision of the Semantic Web, a future incarnation of the Web in which
content will be interpreted and manipulated by computers rather than
simply read by humans. In other words, the Semantic Web will be more
instinctual than the current version.

For its part, Cycorp essentially is attempting to transform computers
from idiot savants into almost-sentient beings. And De Oliveira says
the Cyc knowledge base--and its pending open-source subset--is crucial
to making that happen. The knowledge base is filled with concepts we
take for granted, things that infuse human decision-making with common
sense. "It contains assertions about things I know you know, even
though I don't know you," De Oliveira says. For instance, we all know
that we can't carry our desks home in our pockets, but a computer
doesn't. Cycorp is working to change that.

De Oliveira says Cycorp plans to release a beta version of the OpenCyc
knowledge base later this month, with wide release scheduled by the
end of the year. Users who install the OpenCyc knowledge base will
have the freedom to develop proprietary applications, which is not the
case with most open-source software. They will, however, have to share
any general knowledge they add to the database. De Oliveira says that,
over time, Cycorp will release the bulk of the Cyc knowledge base, but
it will always keep the most recent additions under wraps so it can
develop some proprietary technologies of its own.

See http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010831S0023
and www.cycorp.com