>> I would bet that merging two KB's obtained by mining natural >> language would work a lot better than merging two KB's >> like Cyc and SUMO that were artificially created by humans.
I think that this phrasing confuses the issue. It is the structure of the final KR scheme, not how the initial KBs were created/obtained that determines that difficulty of merging the KBs. A natural language mining KB's KR scheme is going to be forced to be *much* more flexible in it's representation than Cyc and SUMO are (thus, your intuition is correct but only because neither Cyc nor SUMO have a sufficiently flexible KR scheme). >> The problem seems to be that we don't, explicitly and declaratively, >> know how our internal, intuitive knowledge bases are structured. My personal opinion is that we *don't* have only one way in which our internal, intuitive knowledge bases are structured. I think (and hope) that we have a reasonably small number of KR meta-structures that we load fairly simply linked data/knowledge into and that the building of KR structures is both difficult and the source of our intelligence. >> IMO, the whole approach of building explicit knowledge-bases >> like Cyc and SUMO is a dead-end. But this is the really, really important point. Building an explicit knowledge base is like handing the AGI a fish. We can hand the AGI the beginnings of a structure (a pole and string) and teach it to learn -- but we also have to be really, really careful that we don't cripple it by a poor initial choice of what we give it (which is what I think Cyc and SUMO do -- and I don't mean to imply that those were bad projects since they were excellent stepping stones and valuable sources of *data*). ----- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=63820507-b85b67
