Overview
The project was started in 1984 as part of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. The objective was to codify, in machine-usable form, millions of pieces of knowledge that compose human common sense. CycL presented a proprietary knowledge representation schema that utilized first-order relationships. In 1986, Doug Lenat estimated the effort to complete Cyc would be 250,000 rules and 350 man-years of effort. The Cyc Project was spun off into Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas in 1994.
The name "Cyc" (from "encyclopedia", pronounced like syke) is a registered trademark owned by Cycorp. The original knowledge base is proprietary, but a smaller version of the knowledge base, intended to establish a common vocabulary for automatic reasoning, was released as OpenCyc under an open source (Apache) license. More recently, Cyc has been made available to AI researchers under a research-purposes license as ResearchCyc.
Typical pieces of knowledge represented in the database are "Every tree is a plant" and "Plants die eventually". When asked whether trees die, the inference engine can draw the obvious conclusion and answer the question correctly. The Knowledge Base (KB) contains over one million human-defined assertions, rules or common sense ideas. These are formulated in the language CycL, which is based on predicate calculus and has a syntax similar to that of the Lisp programming language.
Much of the current work on the Cyc project continues to be knowledge engineering, representing facts about the world by hand, and implementing efficient inference mechanisms on that knowledge. Increasingly, however, work at Cycorp involves giving the Cyc system the ability to communicate with end users in natural language, and to assist with the knowledge formation process via machine learning.
Like many companies, Cycorp has ambitions to use the Cyc natural language understanding tools to parse the entire internet to extract structured data.
In 2008, Cyc resources were mapped to many Wikipedia articles, potentially easing connecting with other open datasets like DBpedia and Freebase.
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