Hmm - depends on what you mean by "progress". The CYC group originally started as an industry consortium , then after ten years became a private organization. Its size has varied mostly from twenty-five to fifty employees. Its early phases depended a lot on Department of Defense projects. DoD required that CYC release its basic ontology, which is now freely available as "OpenCYC". It full ontology is a lot larger and more sophisticated. More recently, they completed a several-year project for the Cleveland Clinic, using the ontology to integrate their many databases. Database integration is probably the most immediately useful application for an ontology. Problem is, such projects are always proprietary. We know that a number of companies have used ontologies (not only CYC, but SUMO and other as well) but we have no access to the results. There have been proposals to build public-domain ontologies to demonstrate their use, but those proposals have not been funded. Money is the main problem. Supporting 25-50 people would be considered "progress" in my view. I would be curious to know if anyone is making money from use of the DBpedia ontology. That could be instructive, if we could see what they are doing.
And the proprietary nature of commercial applications is precisely the reason that I have spent time building the COSMO ontology. If the full CYC were public domain, I would just be using it and modifying it, primarily for Natural Language understanding tasks. As it is, the COSMO includes much of the top level of OpenCYC, the parts that are not peculiarly designed for the CYC reasoner. It also includes parts of SUMO, DOLCE, and a few other top-level ontologies, plus a lot that is not in any of those ontologies. The function of the COSMO is to enable accurate interoperability as a public-domain resource - to serve as a common language for computer applications that use logical inferencing and want to communicate accurately. To demonstrate that it can function that way, there needs to be more than one local application that uses it and communicates with other users. The DBpedia could be one. The biggest problem in getting local groups to adopt a common foundation ontology has been the widespread misunderstanding about the nature of basic ontologies. It is not "impossible" to have one logic-based computer language to serve as a means of communication between local applications; it is both possible and necessary, if one wants accurate communication. Local enterprises build data warehouses to integrate their databases, and they work fine internally, but cannot communicate with other data warehouses because they do not rely on a common basic language. If you want evidence that, when properly motivated, people will all learn a common language, go to any international scientific conference and try to talk in Urdu or Warlpiri. The good news about use of a common foundation ontology is that, in any local group that wants to use it for external communication, there needs to be only one member who is "bilingual" in both the local terminology and the common foundation ontology, to translate those elements that need to be communicated. If anyone is interested in an objective discussion of how to use a foundation ontology for interoperability, I will be happy to spend time explaining the principles. Or one can look at the ppt or Word discussion at http://micra.com/COSMO. I would prefer not to engage in rhetorical debates. Pat Patrick Cassidy MICRA Inc. [email protected] 908-561-3416 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Morris Sent: Friday, May 10, 2013 10:12 AM To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project. Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories. On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Patrick Cassidy <[email protected]> wrote: Logically sound ontologies have been built and used for years - they are not only possible, but multiple examples exist. The CYC ontology (under development since 1985) has over 100,000 categories, and has been used commercially on large projects, and is well-structured and exhaustively tested. Cyc actually started in 1984. Wikipedia started in 2001. Which has made more progress? Could you give some examples of where Cyc has been used successfully commercially? The Wikipedia page has a couple of projects under development, but nothing actually deployed. Tom
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