Finally Leveraging 30 Years of Knowledge in AI?

In the Enterprise we talked to Cyc for potential application in the enterprise, but at the time there were no clear applications.   Cyc is an attempt to record and make useful common knowledge that can be part of AI. Ultimately fundamental to create generally useful virtual assistants.

In Technology Review:
Doug Lenat’s creation is Cyc, a knowledge base of semantic information designed to give computers some understanding of how things work in the real world.

Cyc has been given many thousands of facts, including lots of information that you wouldn’t find in an encyclopedia because it seems self-evident. It knows, for example, that that Sir Isaac Newton is a famous historical figure who is no longer alive. But more important, Cyc also understands that if you let go of an apple it will fall to the ground; that an apple is not bigger than a person; and that a person cannot throw an apple into space.

And now, after years of work, Lenat’s system is being commercialized by a company called Lucid. .... 
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