Re: SUO: Let's focus
At 20:42 2002-04-08, jim.s3@juno.com wrote:
>Bill and SUO Participants,
>
> ...
>
> OpenCyc will probably be proposed as a starter document within a
> few weeks. I'm surprised at the lack of discussions on this.
Jim,
I'd have to say that OpenCyc isn't open. Unless its theorem prover /
inference engine code is released, it is fundamentally impossible to know
what the system really is or does. I don't believe reverse engineering it
is a suitable way to make this determination.
How can it become an IEEE standard (starter, draft, or otherwise) when the
most important element in attaching semantics to expressions in CycL is hidden?
From <http://www.opencyc.org/OpenCyc_org/faq/faq1_html>:
"Q: Will the inference engine be open source? Why (not)?
"A: Effectively yes, but not quite 100% at this time. Cycorp intends to
sell premium products and services using its inference engine, which has
been designed to work with the Cyc Knowledge Base in an optimal fashion.
Cycorp provides a reference Cyc Server executable for Intel-based Linux and
for Windows 2000 along with the release. This includes a basic
implementation of its inference engine, but no source code. This coupled
with the Cyc API is almost as powerful as open source code."
The most charitable thing I can say about this, especially the last
sentence, is that it betrays a deep, fundamental misunderstanding of what
open source is.
OpenCyc is not open source software. It's hard to see how they got
resources from SourceForge with a huge gap like this in the source code
they release.
Randall Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA
>...
>
>Jim Schoening