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Cyc

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description Cyc Overview

Cyc is a structured knowledge base built through iterative refinement by a team of experts, aiming to represent common sense and everyday understanding in a machine-readable format with detailed relationships between concepts.

help Cyc FAQ

What is Cyc designed to represent?

Cyc is a machine-readable knowledge base and reasoning system designed to represent common-sense concepts and relationships about the real world. The project was started by Douglas Lenat at MCC in July 1984 and later continued by Cycorp.

How does Cyc differ from a normal database?

Cyc's knowledge base stores axioms and relationships that an inference engine can combine to derive conclusions, rather than merely returning matching records. Cycorp describes its representation language, CycL, as expressive enough for higher-order logical relationships.

How large is the Cyc knowledge base?

Cyc's current platform page describes more than 40,000 predicates, over 1.5 million concepts, and more than 25 million explicitly stated axioms. Those figures describe the proprietary Cyc platform, not the much smaller historical OpenCyc release.

What is CycL used for?

CycL is the formal knowledge-representation language used to encode concepts, rules, and relationships for Cyc's inference system. It lets Cyc express nested statements such as what one person believes about another person's action, which is harder to model with a simple subject-predicate-object triple.

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