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Comment by mepian

2 years ago

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

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mepian

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observationist  2 years ago

OWL and SPARQL inference engines that use RDF and DSMs - there are LISPy variants like datadog still kicking around, but there are some great, high performance reasoner FOSS projects, like StarDog or Neo4j

https://github.com/orgs/stardog-union/

Looks like Knowledge Graph and semantic reasoner are the search terms du'jour, I haven't tracked these things since OpenCyc stopped being active.

Humans may not be able to effectively trudge through the creation of trillions of little rules and facts needed for an explicit and coherent expert world model, but LLMs definitely can be used for this.

  • zozbot234  2 years ago

    You can actually do "inference" or "deduction" over large amounts of data using any old-fashioned RDBMS, and get broadly equal or better performance than the newfangled "graph" based systems. Graph databases may be a clear win for very specialized network analysis, but that is rare in practice.

    • p_l  2 years ago

      Graph databases win in flexibility and ease of writing the queries over graphs, honestly.

      Of course the underlying storage can be (and often is) a bunch of specially prepared relational tables.

      But the strength in graph databases comes from restating the problem in different way, with query languages targeting the specific problem space.

      Similarly there are tasks where SQL will be plainly better.

      5 replies →

  • riku_iki  2 years ago

    > high performance reasoner FOSS projects, like StarDog or Neo4j

    StarDog is not FOSS, that github repo is for various utils around their proprietary package in my understanding, actual engine code is not open source.

nextos  2 years ago

There are some pretty huge ontology DBs in molecular biology, like GO or Reactome.

But they have never truly exploited logic-based inference, except for some small academic efforts.

  • jerven  2 years ago

    I think that GO with GO-CAM is definitely going that way. Basic GO is rather simple and can't infer that much (as in GO by itself has low classification or inference logic build in). Uberon, for anatomy, does use a lot of OWL power and shows that the logic-based inference can help a lot.

    Reactome, is a graph, because that is the domain. But technically it does little with that fact (In my disappointed opinion).

    Given that GO and Reactome are also relatively small academic efforts in general...

niviksha  2 years ago

There are a few symbolic logic entailment engines that run atop OWL the Web Ontology Language, some flavors of which which are rough equivalent of Cycs KBs. The challenge though is the underlying approaches are computationally hard so nobody really uses them in practice, plus the retrieval language associated with OWL is SPARQL which also has little traction.

tunesmith  2 years ago

At a much lower level, I've been having fun hacking away at my Concludia side project over time. It's purely proposition level and will eventually support people being able to create their own arguments and contest others. http://concludia.org/

  • sundarurfriend  2 years ago

    Nice! I've wanted to build something like this for a long time. It requires good faith argument construction from both parties, but it's useful to make the possibility available when you do find the small segment of people who can do that.

  • jnwatson  2 years ago

    Very cool! I've had this idea for 20 years. I'm glad I didn't get around to making it.

gumby  2 years ago

Err…OpenCyc?