F.8 Cyc

F.8.1 Overview

Cyc is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less “brittle” when confronted with novel situations.
The first version of OpenCyc was released in spring 2002 and contained only 6,000 concepts and 60,000 facts. The knowledge base was released under the Apache License.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
See also: https://www.cyc.com/the-cyc-platform

F.8.2 Top-level

The developers of Cyc did not believe that the top-most levels of the ‘ontology’ mattered a great deal. They thought the hard work is done lower down. And so, their  top-level is very simple – with no real explicit foundational ontological commitments.

Cyc allows multiple inheritance (multiple is-a parents): for example, Intangible Stuff has Intangible Object and Stuff as parents. It uses Collection for higher order types.

F.8.3 Key characteristics

Cyc is a generic TLO. It intentionally has few ontological commitments.

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Return to Appendix : Candidate source top-level ontologies – longlist

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Continue to Appendix G: Prior ontological commitment literature