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I've been following Cyc since the Lenat papers in the 80s. Wondering what happened to OpenCyc, if you guys changed your thinking about the benefits of an open e

I've been following Cyc since the Lenat papers in the 80s. Wondering what happened to OpenCyc, if you guys changed your thinking about the benefits of an open ecosystem, and if there's any future plans there?

brundolf 8y ago
I've only been here for a couple years, so my perspective on that is limited. My understanding is that we still have some form of it available (I believe it's now called "ResearchCyc"), but there isn't a lot of energy around supporting it, much less promoting it. As to why that is, my best guess is a combination of not having enough man-hours (we're still a relatively small company) and how difficult it has historically been for people to jump in and play with Cyc. There could also be a cultural lack of awareness that people still have interest in tinkering with it, which is something I've thought about bringing up for discussion. As to the accessibility issue, that's been one of our greatest hurdles in general, and it's something we're actively working on reducing. The inference engine itself is something really special, but in the past most of our contracts have been pretty bespoke; we essentially hand-built custom applications with Cyc at their core. This isn't because Cyc wasn't generic enough, it's because Cyc was hard enough to use that only we could do it. We're currently working to bridge that gap. I'm personally part of an effort to modernize our UIs/development tools, and to add things like JSON APIs, for example. Others are working on much-needed documentation, and on sanding off the rough edges to make the whole thing more of a "product". We also have an early version of containerized builds. Currently these quality-of-life improvements are aimed at improving our internal development process, but many of them could translate easily to opening things up more generally in the future. I hope we do so.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Good write-up, confirms my suspicions. Thanks for your thoughts.
_delirium 8y ago
There's an official statement of sorts here: https://www.cyc.com/opencyc/ https://www.cyc.com/opencyc/ That meshes with what I've heard at conferences, that Cyc management was worried people were treating OpenCyc as an evaluation version of Cyc, even though it was significantly less capable, and using its capabilities to decide whether to license Cyc or not. The new approach seems to be that you can get a free version of Cyc (the full version) for evaluation or research purposes, and the open-source version was discontinued.

brundolf 8y ago

I've only been here for a couple years, so my perspective on that is limited. My understanding is that we still have some form of it available (I believe it's now called "ResearchCyc"), but there isn't a lot of energy around supporting it, much less promoting it. As to why that is, my best guess is a combination of not having enough man-hours (we're still a relatively small company) and how difficult it has historically been for people to jump in and play with Cyc. There could also be a cultural lack of awareness that people still have interest in tinkering with it, which is something I've thought about bringing up for discussion. As to the accessibility issue, that's been one of our greatest hurdles in general, and it's something we're actively working on reducing. The inference engine itself is something really special, but in the past most of our contracts have been pretty bespoke; we essentially hand-built custom applications with Cyc at their core. This isn't because Cyc wasn't generic enough, it's because Cyc was hard enough to use that only we could do it. We're currently working to bridge that gap. I'm personally part of an effort to modernize our UIs/development tools, and to add things like JSON APIs, for example. Others are working on much-needed documentation, and on sanding off the rough edges to make the whole thing more of a "product". We also have an early version of containerized builds. Currently these quality-of-life improvements are aimed at improving our internal development process, but many of them could translate easily to opening things up more generally in the future. I hope we do so.

imglorp 8y ago
Good write-up, confirms my suspicions. Thanks for your thoughts.

_delirium 8y ago

There's an official statement of sorts here: https://www.cyc.com/opencyc/ https://www.cyc.com/opencyc/ That meshes with what I've heard at conferences, that Cyc management was worried people were treating OpenCyc as an evaluation version of Cyc, even though it was significantly less capable, and using its capabilities to decide whether to license Cyc or not. The new approach seems to be that you can get a free version of Cyc (the full version) for evaluation or research purposes, and the open-source version was discontinued.