Abstract
The Cyc project was begun in the mid-80 s by Doug Lenat to become an ontology of “all commonsense knowledge.” This goal was often defined as all the knowledge that one would need in order to understand encyclopedia articles. For this reason the name “Cyc” was derived from “encyclopedia” and is pronounced that way. A corollary is that the Cyc Language (CycL) must be designed to be expressive enough to express any thought that may be included in an encyclopedia and to reason about anything that can be so expressed to obtain the unstated information implicit in the text.
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Notes
- 1.
The Cyc project started as part of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), spinning off in 1994 to become Cycorp.
- 2.
See Section 12.2.1 below.
- 3.
A class is considered a subclass of itself.
- 4.
- 5.
For the sake of efficiency and manageability, the #$BaseKB has been separated into a set of mutually accessable contexts for the use of internal reasoning modules.
- 6.
A microtheory is considered a #$genlMt of itself. This is an exception to the genlMt graph being a DAG.
- 7.
The term “spec” – short for “specialization” – is Cyc terminology for the inverse of “genl” – short for “generalization”.
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Foxvog, D. (2010). Cyc. In: Poli, R., Healy, M., Kameas, A. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8847-5_12
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