What theoretical foundation is behind Cyc ?
Cyc is not a theoretical effort, although there has been a lot of theory used in its construction. The Cyc team prefers to think of the project as an engineering effort. The primary focus of the Cyc project is to actually start consolidating a cohesive knowledge bank. Any theoretical issues which have been addressed have been directly motivated by the requirements of solving specific problems. The Cyc team believes that a hand-encoded effort using symbolic logic may express a significant fraction of the fundamental human knowledge typically shared by most people. This bootstrap process is greatly enhanced by the redundant nature of knowledge. Most knowledge uses and re-uses the same basic ideas and relationships in many different ways. The day to day entering of knowledge is not based on ethereal definitions of elaborate Causality and Time-Space-Intelligence collections. Most data is as plebian as ‘living organisms have to eat to stay alive’ or ‘broom handles tend to be made of wood’.
