CycL

CycL in computer science and artificial intelligence is an ontology language used by Doug Lenat's Cyc artificial intelligence project. Ramanathan V. Guha was instrumental in the design of early versions of the language. There is a close variant of CycL known as MELD. The original version of CycL was a frame language, but the modern version is not. Rather, it is a declarative language based on classical first-order logic, with extensions for modal operators and higher order quantification. CycL is used to represent the knowledge stored in the Cyc Knowledge Base, available from Cycorp. The source code written in CycL released with the OpenCyc system is licensed as open source, to increase its usefulness in supporting the semantic web. CycL has some basic ideas: Naming the constants used to refer to information for represented concepts. Grouping the constants together in a generalization/specialization hierarchy (usually called categorization). Stating general rules that support inference about the concepts. The truth or falsity of a CycL sentence is context-relative; these contexts are represented in CycL as Microtheories. The concept names in Cyc are known as constants. Constants start with "#" and are case-sensitive. There are constants for: Individual items known as individuals, such as #BillClinton or #France. Collections, such as #Tree-ThePlant (containing all trees) or #EquivalenceRelation (containing all equivalence relations). A member of a collection is called an instance of that collection. Truth Functions which can be applied to one or more other concepts and return either true or false. For example, #siblings is the sibling relationship, true if the two arguments are siblings. By convention, truth function constants start with a lower-case letter. Truth functions may be broken down into logical connectives (such as #and, #or, #not, #implies), quantifiers (#forAll, #thereExists, etc.) and predicates. Functions, which produce new terms from given ones.