Summary
From the website: "OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine."

I'm not sure about their claims, however, the project looks very interesting.

OpenCyc can be used as the basis of a wide variety of intelligent applications such as:

• speech understanding
• database integration
• rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area
• email prioritizing, routing, summarization, and annotating to name just a few.

Release 1.0 of OpenCyc will include:

• 6,000 concepts: an upper ontology for all of human consensus reality.
• 60,000 assertions about the 6,000 concepts, interrelating them, constraining them, in effect (partially) defining them.
• A compiled version of the Cyc Inference Engine and the Cyc Knowledge Base Browser.
• A suite of "RKF" tools for rapidly extracting knowledge from a domain expert (e.g., a physician or oil drilling specialist), tools which operate by carrying on a clarification dialogue with that individual; hence: tools for answering questions via English dialogue.
• Documentation and self-paced learning materials to help users achieve a basic- to intermediate-level understanding of the issues of knowledge representation and application development using Cyc.
• A specification of CycL, the language in which Cyc (and hence OpenCyc) is written. There are CycL-to-Lisp, CycL-to-C, etc. translators.
• A specification of the Cyc API, by calling which a programmer can build an OpenCyc application with very little familiarity with CycL or with the OpenCyc KB.
• The ability to import and export CycML files.
• A few sample programs that demonstrate use of the Cyc API for application development.

http://www.opencyc.org/

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About the Blogger

R. Dale Asberry been hacking since 1978, professionally since 1990. He's certified in Java 1.1 and has a four digit MCP number. He discovered Jini at the 2000 JavaOne and has been building incredibly cool, dynamic, distributed architectures ever since! Over time, he's discovered several principles that have contributed to his success - they are the Princples of: Enabling Others, Simplicity, No Complaining, Least Work, Least Surprise, Least Damage, and "It Just Works".