It is machine-readable by an AI. The question is, where's the AI? ;)

Exactly. "In fact, the gain from the Semantic Web comes much before [AI]. Maybe [in 2001] we should have written about enterprise and intra-enterprise data integration and scientific data integration. So I think data integration is the name of the game...What we should realize is that the return on investment will come much earlier when we just have got this interoperable data that we can query over." - Tim Berners-Lee, Feb 7 2008, interview (http://talis-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.htm...)

"Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL." - Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, 15 Jan 2008 Press Release (http://www.w3.org/2007/12/sparql-pressrelease)

"SPARQL's focus on querying the data models saves time for developers; there's no need for a host of little Web services to retrieve different aspects of the state of a system. This allows the user of the SPARQL endpoint to ask any question -- it is as though they could design their own interface instead of having to work with a limited set of fixed services." - Lee Feigenbaum, Chair of the RDF Data Access Working Group (i.b.i.d.)

What do you think of Cyc?

http://www.cyc.com/

Argh. 8week cut me off.

Bad grammar today. Meant to say 'isn't complete until an AI reads the semantic web' Time to go back to testing.

I've looked carefully at their logic and epistemology, and what I found had many problems. Their data is full of contradiction, so they had to come up with a way to focus on subsets of the data to get a meaningful answer from a query. The reason for the contradiction, as far as I can tell, is their lack of a consistent model for what a concept is vs. what a word is, etc. Also missing seems to be the formal definition functionality necessary to make the model work, such as an unambiguous genus for a concept, and an unambiguous differentia of that genus reducable to the form of a logical formula. In other words, you should be able to take a genus, run the differentia forumla on it, and get only the instances of the concept that your looking at out. The contradictions are so deep, that adding information was slowed significantly (I think I read this in some of their articles). So I think the CYC approach is simply the wrong one, not that some interesting information can't be harvested from their data and deployed in the right way.

The only part of Cyc I've looked at is OpenCyc and that was a few years ago when I was heavy into AI in college. I think it's a great effort!

They've been working on Cyc for about 20 years or more. If it were a worthwhile direction to take AI in, it would have yielded results by now.

I hear you, but I'd be hard pressed to say that making all common sense knowledge machine readable is not a worthwhile direction.

I'd be happy to make such a claim, and many people much smarter than I am would as well.

Common sense reasoning is a dead end IMO.

Are they yielding reasonable results in micro-domains right now? Like specifically terrorism-related defense?

Semantic Web is not a binary concept. It's notall or nothing. There's tons of advantages we can get while ramping up support for it.