SUO: RE: OpenCyc Announcement
Pat Hayes wrote:
> Give away Cyc? I'll believe it when I see it. Read the fine print.
> Doug has also, apparently, announced that this give-away will be done
> using DAML+OIL, which is not capable of expressing about 90% of the
> content of the Cyc ontology.
Yes, the fine print always rules -- I don't think Cyc is actually being
given away -- I wonder whether the 10% of Cyc that might be given away via
DAML+OIL will be relevant to SUO...
>
> On the other hand, there is no doubt that there is a LOT of stuff in
> Cyc, and much of it is very thoroughly debugged. Cycorp is also
> working very hard right now on building a usable NL interface, by the
> way, in the context of the DARPA-funded RKF (rapid knowledge
> formation) project, so I suspect that a critique written in 1996 is
> now largely irrelevant.
Perhaps, thought I don't think we should assume this. The 1996 critique
mentioned some theoretical issues, and it would be interesting to know if
and how they've been addressed...
> I know they have every confidence that they
> will become the 'standard' or at least the state-of-the-art for
> effective use of the 'semantic web', rather in the way that Dolby
> became the de facto standard for audio technology just by being so
> much better than anyone else at just the right time.
Counterexamples come to mind: Betamax vs. VHS... The standard that's
accepted isn't always the best from a purely technical point of view...It
may be the one that has the right minimal set of features at the lowest
cost, for the largest user base ... Whatever best satisfies the Pareto
principle... And over time, the tool that wins the largest user base and
becomes the standard, may become superior technically even though it wasn't
at the start --
> However, being
> the world's largest repository of 'common sense' is one thing, and
> being a usable industrial standard is something else.
Agreed...
>
> If the SUO sees itself as competing with Cyc, then we might as well
> all just save our effort and do something else. If we see ourselves
> as having fun, of course, then that is a different matter altogether.
Well if it isn't fun we shouldn't do it, though hopefully we'll accomplish
something useful. I agree, we shouldn't think in terms of competing with
Cyc -- our goal should be to determine the right set of useful requirements
for SUO, and expeditiously find the best way to satisfy them.
Phil Jackson
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