Ben Rode: Porting the Cyc Ontology to RDF – Episode 53

Ben Rode

As the Cyc project winds down, one of its main contributors, Benjamin Rode, is attempting to migrate as much as possible of its upper ontology to RDF. It's an ambitious project, much like Cyc itself.

Cyc arose from the early AI research community, and Ben has a fascinating perspective on that milieu as well.

We talked about:

his work to port as much as possible of the Cyc upper ontology into RDF

the surprisingly long history of neuro-symbolic AI

some interesting details and anecdotes about the origins of the field of AI

the deep intertwining of the histories of symbolic AI and computing itself

Doug Lenat and the origins of the Cyc project and the Cycorp company

Lenat's concept of "white space knowledge," the framing for unstructured natural language text

how an attempt to port the Cyc ontology to RDF is "not as insane an exercise as it might sound at first"

some parallels and distinction between the RDF and Cyc worlds