CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineering invited talk by Dr. Doug Lenat (Cycorp) on 11/17/2005

* Invited Speaker Dr. Douglas Lenat, from Cycorp (Austin, TX, USA), will be presenting to the community. His talk is entitled: andquot;CYC: Lessons Learned in Large-Scale Ontological Engineeringandquot; * Date Thursday, November 17, 2005 * Details on ONTOLOG Wiki page http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2005_11_17 * Abstract (by Doug Lenat): The pursuit of Artificial Intelligence -- from robotics to natural language processing to automated learning -- has been held back by the andquot;brittleness bottleneckandquot; caused by the need for common sense. For 21 years, weandapos;ve been priming the pump, building up a formalized corpus of such knowledge, Cyc. Along the way, weandapos;ve had to revise our preconceptions and theories, to expand our representation language and arsenal of inference methods, to find approximate yet adequate engineering solutions to problems that philosophers have grappled with for millennia such as ontologizing aspects of substances versus individual objects, time, space, causality, belief, social interactions, and so on. The process of ontological engineering had to grow and evolve throughout this enterprise, as well, such as how Cyc represents and reasons with contradictions and context. In this talk I will try to cover both the large scale picture of what weandapos;ve built and why, and the detailed picture of how itandapos;s built, and the lessons learned along the way in how and how not to do large-scale OE. I will report on our recent efforts to make Cyc more accessible to the broader community through OpenCyc and ResearchCyc, which raises issues of how multiple individuals and groups can share and integrate their extensions (and settle their differences). Finally, I will discuss an exciting new effort we have just had funded, to gather automated reasoning researchers together for a series of workshops in 2006 on speeding up inference in large knowledge bases by orders of magnitude.