Pat, (01)
There is a very simple and obvious resolution: (02)
PC> The last time I inquired, Ontology Works was making almost
> all their money from government contracts. On the other hand,
> JS claimed that Cyc 'failed' because it depended on government
> contracts, though that situation has changed to where Cyc now
> gets most of its money from private contracts. But according
> to JS, Ontology Works hasn't "failed". Perhaps there is a
> resolution to this apparent discrepancy? (03)
The gov't provides research grants *and* application contracts.
Cyc got almost all their funding for the first 20 years from
research grants and very little from applications. They did
work on some applications for their contracts, but none that
were successfully deployed (at least for the first 20 years). (04)
Ontology Works got their funding from application development
on government contracts, not from research grants. They are
now moving to more commercial applications. (05)
Cyc failed to do much of anything useful when they were doing
pure research. Now that they can't get lucrative research
contracts, they're finally doing something useful. (06)
And by the way, I think that Lenat should have hired the three
co-authors of that paper back in 1998 and built an application
business around their work. But Lenat didn't approve of their
approach: extracting domain-dependent ontologies from the Cyc
resources and running them outside of the Cyc system. (07)
Another point: When Ontology Works got started, they used a
large monolithic ontology. But as time went on, they discovered
that it was more useful to break it up into smaller modules
that are easier to "plug in" to various applications. (08)
John (09)
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