zlacker

>>fogus+(OP)
The Cyc project, while fascinating, is basically a serious attempt at a general purpose semantic graph. It's been in the works since the early 80's.

And you know what? It should act as a warning to anybody thinking seriously about building large-scale semantic systems like the semantic web.

Cyc is pretty much useless (or at least the utility it provides is not exactly setting the world on fire). Until somebody can figure out how to employ an already very mature semantic graph like Cyc and do something(s) truly useful with it, don't waste anybody's time advocating the semantic web.

More imporantly, Cyc is a highly controlled semantic graph, with all of its information carefully curated. Imagine how terrible the results of semantic inference engines will be in the wild-west of the web!

>>elblan+s3
I looked at CYC a few years ago and found the underlying epistemology of the effort flawed in such a way that the result is a mass of contradictions in the project. Their solution to that was to try to zoom in on tiny areas to avoid the contradictions with other areas - but in the factual world, there really aren't these contradictions. The other clear sign of serious trouble was their explanation that adding definitions to the system was taking longer and longer - if anything it should accelerate if their underlying structure was good.

I think the CYC project should be used only as an example of spending a huge amount of time and money on a flawed structure as opposed to a condemnation of semantic approaches.