On 1/24/07, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Given my experience while employed at Cycorp, I would say that there are
two ways to work with them. The first way is to collaborate with Cycorp on a sponsored project. Collaborators are mainly universities (e.g. CMU & Stanford) and established research companies (e.g. SRI & SAIC) who have a track record of receiving government grants, and whose technologies are complementary to Cyc. I would not suggest this approach for MindPixel 2 yet.
The second approach involves no exchange of money. Cycorp wants to
promote its ontology - its commonsense vocabulary, and has released its definitions with a very permisive license as OpenCyc. One can also obtain nearly the entire Cyc knowledge base with a Research Cyc license for research purposes without fee, but with the RCyc license you are not allowed to extract facts and rules for MindPixel 2.
You could contact the Cyc Foundation, which is an independent organization
run by a friend of mine and former Cycorp employee. They are seeking to add knowledge to Cyc by using volunteers and I believe that they would be very receptive to MindPixel 2 provided it uses a form of the OpenCyc vocabulary for knowledge representation.
I suggest obtaining an RCyc license to see how the Cyc inference engine
handles large rule and fact sets, and to see if the Cyc vocabulary fits your idea of a commonsense representation language. Somehow I feel that Cyc's knowledge representation scheme is not good enough, but designing a new scheme is quite challenging. I'm wondering if a MindPixel 2 project can sidestep this issue, by being as unstructured as possible. First of all we need to translate the NL sentences into logic; this I have come up with some ideas. Unfortunately that is not the whole story. Sometimes we need to link one sentence to another. For example there may be 2 sentences: S1 = "The French people executed Louis 16." S2 = "Napoleon rose to power." And we should connect S1 and S2 with the link "_later_in_time_". Thus the facts exist within a large web of connections. Otherwise, the sentences alone may be nonsense when taken out of context. Cyc faces the same problem. I think they deal with it by using what they call microtheories. I don't want to make the project overly complicated, but it seems that we must deal with these issues. I'll give it more thought... If we end up using different knowledge representations, exchanging data would be not so easy =( YKY ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
