An Introduction to the CYC Knowledge Base Essay -- CYC Project Technol

An Introduction to the CYC Knowledge Base I. Abstract This paper is intended to be an introductory tutorial on the Very Large Knowledge Base (VLKB) called CYC. Described herein is the reasoning for the origination of the CYC project, the intended usefulness of the project (application areas), how CYC is being constructed, and a brief introduction to the supporting tools that have been developed to interact with the CYC knowledge base. II. Introduction Many Knowledge Bases (KB) have been developed to help people solve problems in very specific applications. These are relatively simple to build since the knowledge required by the specific system needs to be only those facts required to solve the problem in that particular application. An example of this type of KB would be one that contains only the information needed to diagnose particular fungal and bacterial infections. The KB would need to know about the different attributes of the microscopic organisms and their affects on the host but would not need to know that the grass is green or that the earth revolves around the sun. The CYC common sense Knowledge Base takes the opposite approach. CYC is being created to hold information that most people would consider to be common sense knowledge. The idea is to create a KB that would supply the basic knowledge needed to be applicable to many different applications. By building a KB with this general knowledge, it is hoped that the KB will be able to learn (create new inferences) by itself and be able to tell when it does not have enough information in a particular domain to resolve a problem. The CYC project was started by Doug Lenat at MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, now Cycorp, Inc.) in Aust... ...nology", Cycorp, Inc, http://www.cyc.com Ginsberg, Matthew L., Essentials of Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. ISBN 1-55860-221-6 Lenat, D.B., Guha, R.V., "Ideas for Applying CYC", Cycorp, Inc, http://www.cyc.com/tech-reports/act-cyc-407-91/act-cyc-407-91.html Mayfield, James; Finin, Tim; Narayanaswamy, Rajkumar; Shah, Chetan; MacCartney, William; Goolsbey, Keith, "The Cycic Friends Network: getting Cyc agents to reason together", University Of Maryland - Baltimore County, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~cikm/iia/submitted/viewing/mayfield Pratt, Vaughan, "CYC Report", Stanford University, April 16, 1994, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~narayan/proj/cyc-critic.html Rajkumar & Shah, "A Study to assess the usefulness of CYC in a mediated architecture", University Of Maryland - Baltimore County, CYC KQML Project, http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~narayan/proj/doc.html