John,
What has been tried with Cyc is certainly of interest. (01)
>> So you can't blame Cyc's lack of commercial applications
>> on a lack of effort.
I'm not so sure. I think that using an ontology effectively will take
a lot more effort than creating it. From what I have seen, encoding
knowledge is easier that using it effectively in applications. So it
will be good to know specifics of what has been attempted.
Do you know of anyplace we can find details of attempts to use Cyc,
what was tried, what resources were expended (person-years?), what
method they used, the results, and any post-mortem?
If we can get such information we will have something objective by
which to assess the utility of Cyc.
I have no doubt that an ill-conceived attempt to use any resource
will fail, regardless of the potential of that resource. We could
really use some very specific information on what was tried. a
half-hearted badly underfunded attempt at building any useful artifact
is guaranteed to fail. (02)
As an example, I have spoken with one natural language researcher
who tried to use a description logic, years back, as the interface to
an ontology, and found it didn't help and was difficult to implement.
That suggests that a description logic with that particular ontology is
not useful for NLP. It says nothing about the utility of that ontology
using other logical inferencing methods, nor of the utility of other
ontologies. (03)
Pat (04)
Patrick Cassidy
MITRE Corporation
260 Industrial Way
Eatontown, NJ 07724
Mail Stop: MNJE
Phone: 732-578-6340
Cell: 908-565-4053
Fax: 732-578-6012
Email: pcassidy@xxxxxxxxx (05)
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